I have never been a natural at Alpine driving. Give me a rainy M25 at rush hour and I am almost competent. But chuck me onto a mountain road with hairpin bends, a sat-nav that has clearly given up on life, and a hire car with handbrake I still cannot locate by feel, and things unravel rather quickly.

The journey to Peio Terme in Tyrol had started so promisingly. Innsbruck airport, coffee that actually tasted of something, a car hire desk where nobody tried to sell me excess insurance I did not need. I even remembered to drive on the right, which I count as a personal triumph for the first seventeen minutes. Then came the ascent.

Mountain roads in this part of Austria are not roads in the British sense. They are architectural statements. They cling to cliffsides with the determination of a toddler refusing bedtime. My sat-nav, a cheerful woman who had guided me flawlessly through Innsbruck's ring road, now began issuing instructions with increasing panic. "Turn left," she commanded, as a stone wall presented itself. "Recalculating," she added, with what I can only describe as audible judgment.

The mishap, when it came, was almost embarrassingly mundane. I pulled into what I believed was the property's approach, only to discover I had committed myself to a farm track belonging to an extremely unimpressed local with a tractor the size of a small bungalow. Reversing out required fourteen points, one brief and terrifying encounter with a wooden fence, and a level of sweat production that had me genuinely concerned about dehydration. The farmer watched the entire performance without expression. I have been reviewed more kindly by ex-girlfriends.

By the time I found the actual entrance to Peio Terme, I had aged approximately eleven years. The building sat there, all traditional Tyrolean timber and flower boxes spilling red geraniums, looking impossibly serene. It was the architectural equivalent of someone who had arrived early, composed, and with all the correct documentation. I hated it slightly, while also wanting very much to be allowed inside.

The key collection, I had been told, involved a lockbox. Simple enough. Except I had written the code on my phone, and my phone had chosen this exact altitude to declare itself at four percent battery and falling. There followed a frantic dance of trying the most likely combinations while muttering apologies to nobody in particular, until the blessed click of success. I practically fell through the door.

And then, standing in the hallway with my ridiculous wheeled suitcase that had seemed practical in Croydon and now felt absurdly metropolitan, I stopped. The place smelled of pine and something else, something clean and mountain-specific that no candle in a British shop has ever captured. Through the window, the view stopped my breath properly for the first time since the tractor incident. Peaks everywhere, proper ones with snow lingering in July, and the valley dropping away like a promise.

I thought about the drive, the farmer, the sat-nav's disappointment in me. I thought about how I always do this to myself, turning what should be straightforward into minor chaos through some combination of poor planning and worse luck. But standing there, with my phone finally dead and my hands still faintly trembling from the reverse manoeuvre, I felt something shift. The quiet of the place was not empty. It was waiting, patient and amused, for me to catch up.

I did not catch up that evening, not really. I made tea with a kettle I found by accident, sat on a balcony that creaked reassuringly underfoot, and watched the light change on mountains I had no names for. The mishaps had got me here, in their ridiculous way. Perhaps that was something worth admitting, quietly, to nobody but myself and the geraniums below.