I have never been so relieved to see a wooden balcony in all my life. After seven hours of driving from Manchester, two wrong turns around Innsbruck, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that clearly had it in for me, we finally crawled up the lane to our Moena in Tyrol. The mishap, though. I must tell you about the mishap.

We had stopped at a supermarket in Hopfgarten for supplies, as you do, and I had proudly packed everything into the boot with the precision of a Tetris champion. Cheese, bread, wine, the lot. What I had not packed with any precision whatsoever was my suitcase, which I had left on the pavement outside the shop. We were twenty minutes up the mountain before I noticed. Cue a frantic U-turn on a road barely wide enough for a goat, much less a Vauxhall Astra, and a sheepish retrieval from a very amused cashier who had been keeping it safe behind the tills.

So by the time we reached the Moena, I was already running on pure adrenaline and a bag of Haribo I had demolished somewhere past Munich. The property sits in the hills above the Wildschonau valley, and I will be honest, the first glimpse of it through the trees nearly made me weep. Not because it was grand or fancy, but because it looked exactly like the sort of solid, unbothered Austrian house that has seen worse arrivals than ours and will see plenty more.

The key was in the lockbox as promised, though I spent a good five minutes jabbing at the code with frozen fingers before realising I had been holding the instruction sheet upside down. My partner, who had been mercifully silent about the suitcase incident, finally cracked and laughed so hard he had to lean against the car. The door opened with that satisfying thunk that only heavy wooden doors manage, and we stumbled inside with our ridiculous collection of bags and borrowed shopping trolleys and general chaos.

The smell hit me first. That particular alpine combination of wood polish, old stone, and something faintly herby that I later decided was probably just the mountains themselves seeping through the walls. The Moena is built in traditional Tyrolean style, all dark beams and white plaster, and the living area had this enormous stove that dominated the room like a friendly bear. I immediately pictured myself beside it with a book I would never finish, probably because I would keep dozing off.

The kitchen was compact but properly equipped, not one of those holiday let situations where you get one bent fork and a saucepan with no handle. I ran my hand along the wooden counter and felt something shift in me, some knot of motorway tension finally beginning to loosen. Then I opened what I thought was a cupboard and discovered it was actually the door to a very small utility room, which my partner found hilarious all over again.

Upstairs, the bedrooms had that sloped ceiling situation where you forget once and then spend the rest of the week rubbing your head and swearing. The balcony I mentioned earlier looked out over the valley, and I stood there in my still-wearing motorway clothes, clutching a cup of tea made with a teabag I had found at the bottom of my handbag, and felt genuinely grateful. For the house, for the view, for the fact that my suitcase had not ended up in a skip.

We did not do anything remarkable that first evening. We unpacked badly, ate bread and cheese for dinner because we could not face cooking, and argued gently about whether to light the stove or just go to bed. We did neither, as it happened, just sat on the slightly creaky sofa and watched the light change over the mountains until it got too dark to see.

That was our arrival, really. No great adventure, no Instagram moment, just two tired people in a beautiful wooden house, one of whom had very nearly started her holiday without any trousers. But sitting there, listening to my partner snore within minutes and the absolute silence of the valley beyond, I thought about how often I rush through the beginnings of things, desperate to get to the good part. The good part was this, I realised. The messy, tired, slightly ridiculous good part of having finally arrived somewhere that asks nothing of you except to be still for a moment.

I finished my tea, marked the sloped ceiling with a mental note to duck, and decided the stove could wait until morning.