I have never been so relieved to see a village petrol station in my entire life. There we were, three hours out of Salzburg, winding through the Salzkammergut like we knew what we were doing, when the sat-nav decided that Ebensee was apparently a state of mind rather than an actual place with roads. My partner Dave had insisted on driving, which meant I got to navigate, which meant we spent twenty minutes circling what turned out to be somebody's private driveway while their dog judged us from the window. The mishap that truly sealed our arrival, though, was my brilliant decision to bring a massive glass jar of pickled onions from a Borough Market stall, swaddled in my best jumper for protection. You can guess what happened when Dave took a corner with enthusiasm. The crunch was audible. The smell was immediate. I spent our first ten minutes in Ebensee standing in a lay-by, wearing a jumper that now smelled like a vinegar factory explosion, wondering if this was karma for being smug about London food markets.

The holiday home itself, when we finally found it, was an absolute corker. Proper Austrian solidity, all wooden balconies and that particular hush that comes from being surrounded by mountains and lake water. But I will be honest with you, my first thought was not the view. It was whether the local shops would still be open so I could buy something, anything, to replace those cursed pickled onions.

We dumped our bags and power-walked to the centre, which in Ebensee takes roughly six minutes if you are not distracted by the lake glinting at you. The supermarket was closing in twenty minutes, and I have never done a more focused shop in my life. I grabbed speck, I grabbed cheese with names I could not pronounce, I grabbed eggs with feathers still stuck to them because apparently that is how they roll in Upper Austria. Dave found a beer section that made him actually stop walking, which is rare for a man who treats shopping like a military extraction. We also found fresh bread from a local bakery that had somehow stayed open, and I clutched that loaf like it was the Holy Grail.

That first evening, we cooked in the holiday home kitchen with the kind of chaotic energy that only comes from travel delirium and onion-related trauma. I attempted a proper Austrian-style kasnocken, which is basically posh cheese spaetzle, using a colander because I had not brought the proper equipment because of course I had not. Dave opened a locally brewed beer and made encouraging noises while I pushed dough through holes and muttered. The result was lumpy, slightly wet, and absolutely magnificent with the speck fried until crispy. We ate on the balcony as the light went strange and golden over the Traunsee, and I had one of those moments where you think, right, this is why we do this. The kitchen smelled of butter and regret and something genuinely wonderful.

The next morning, I discovered the local market situation, or rather the lack of a daily one, which sent me into a brief panic until a neighbour, who introduced herself by correcting my pronunciation of "Gruess Gott," pointed me toward a Friday farmers' market in the village square. I marked it in my phone with three alarms. I am not proud. I am also not sorry.

By day three, we had established a routine that revolved embarrassingly heavily around eating. Morning meant the bakery for semmel that shattered properly when you bit them, afternoon meant trying every local schnapps variant "for research," and evening meant cooking increasingly ambitious things in that kitchen while Dave made trips to a pub he had discovered, the name of which I will not attempt to spell, where the landlord had started recognising him and pouring the local beer before he reached the bar. I joined him once, intending one drink, stayed for three, and ate something called a brezen that was roughly the size of my face. The pub had wood panelling that had seen actual centuries, and regulars who nodded at us with the cautious approval of people who have watched many tourists come and go.

I attempted to cook fish from the lake on our fourth night, having been assured by the market vendor that it was "einfach," which I now know means simple in the same way that quantum physics is simple if someone explains it slowly. I overcooked it, underseasoned it, and served it with potatoes I had boiled into a state of mushy surrender. Dave ate it without complaint, which is how I knew he was either very kind or very hungry. We opened a bottle of gruner veltliner and agreed that sometimes the story matters more than the result, though I did quietly bin the leftovers.

The holiday home had a proper outdoor grill, which Dave commandeered with the confidence of a man who owns one pair of tongs at home and uses them for everything. He grilled sausages from a local butcher that snapped when you cut them, proper snappy skins, and we ate them with mustard that cleared my sinuses from across the table. I made a potato salad that finally worked because I stopped trying to be clever and just followed what the woman at the market had told me, word for word, even the bit about the warm broth that feels wrong until it suddenly feels very right.

On our final morning, I walked to the bakery alone, early, before the tourists were about. The semmel were still warm, and I bought an extra one to eat on the walk back, tearing pieces off like a Victorian urchin, no butter, no nothing, just the proper taste of somewhere that knows what bread is supposed to be. The mountains were doing that thing where they look painted on, too perfect to be real, and I stood there with crumbs on my jacket, thinking about how I had arrived smelling like pickled onion disaster and was leaving with flour under my fingernails and a new appreciation for keeping cooking simple.

We packed the car in silence, always a bit sad, always already planning the return. Dave checked the oil. I checked we had not left any food behind, which would have been a genuine tragedy. As we pulled away, I looked back at the balcony where we had eaten so many slightly wrong but completely right meals, and I thought that maybe the best holidays are the ones where you spend half your time slightly out of your depth, cooking things you cannot quite name, in a kitchen that is not yours, eating bread that shatters, and drinking beer poured by someone who knows your face.

I still have not replaced those pickled onions, by the way. Some losses, you learn to live with.