I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I packed the sat nav but forgot the charging cable. There we were, three hours into the drive to Tyrol, squinting at my phone propped against the windscreen like a dodgy takeaway menu holder, when my daughter announced she needed the loo with the kind of urgency only a seven-year-old can muster. We pulled into a petrol station near Innsbruck, I bought a cable that cost roughly the same as a small car, and we set off again with the sat nav blaring directions in what I can only describe as an aggressively calm German accent.

The approach to Peio Terme took us through proper Alpine scenery, the sort that makes you want to open the windows and breathe in deeply until you remember you're in a diesel estate with three children and a labrador who had definitely eaten something questionable at the last service station. The mountains rose up on either side, all pine forests and meadows that looked almost too green to be real, like someone had cranked the saturation up too high on a telly.

We found the property without too much additional drama, though I did manage to reverse into a wooden post while trying to read the house number. Just a scratch, I told my wife, who gave me that particular look she has perfected over fifteen years of marriage. The post, I should add, was completely fine. The bumper less so.

Stepping out of the car, the first thing that hit me was the quiet. Not silence exactly, because there was birdsong and the distant sound of cowbells doing their rhythmic thing, but the absence of traffic noise, of planes overhead, of that constant urban hum you stop noticing until it is not there anymore. The air smelled of pine and something else, something clean that I suppose was just mountain air doing its job properly for once.

The property itself was one of those solid Tyrolean buildings that look like they have been there forever and will remain long after we are all gone. Wooden balconies with flower boxes, the sort of practical architecture that does not bother with fuss but somehow ends up beautiful anyway. My son immediately claimed the upstairs bedroom based on what he called "strategic blanket fort potential," while the dog made a beeline for the garden and proceeded to roll in something I chose not to investigate too closely.

I stood there with a cup of tea that I had somehow already made, though I could not remember doing it, and watched my family unpack with the chaotic energy of people who have been in a car too long. Suitcases exploded in every room. Someone had already lost a shoe. The dog was barking at a butterfly with sincere conviction. And I thought, this is it, this is the good stuff, the messy, unplanned, slightly scratched-bumper stuff that makes a holiday actually feel like yours rather than something borrowed from a brochure.

The mountains would still be there tomorrow. The walking routes and the thermal baths and all the proper activities could wait. For now, there was a wooden post that needed inspecting, a blanket fort to approve, and a cup of tea going cold in my hand while I just stood there, doing nothing very much at all, and feeling absolutely brilliant about it.