I have never been so relieved to see a kettle in my entire life. After six hours of driving from Calais, a slightly tense moment at a Salzburg petrol station where I forgot which side the fuel cap was on, and one spectacular argument with the sat nav that tried to send us up what I can only describe as a goat track, we finally pulled up to our cottage in Ebensee. I turned off the engine, stretched my legs, and promptly dropped the entire contents of my handbag onto the gravel driveway. Out went my phone, three lip balms, a rogue satsuma, and my dignity. The kids thought this was the funniest thing they had seen all year. My husband just opened the boot and pretended not to know me.

The cottage itself was one of those proper wooden affairs that makes you feel like you have stepped into a postcard. Dark timber beams, a balcony that looked out towards the mountains, and a smell inside that I can only describe as "holiday" - that particular blend of pine, old books, and someone else's cleaning products. I stood in the doorway for a good minute just breathing it in, until my youngest pushed past me to claim the top bunk. Some things never change, no matter how scenic the location.

The kitchen was compact but surprisingly well-equipped, which immediately made me feel guilty about the four bags of pasta and the industrial-sized jar of pesto I had panic-bought in Munich. There was even a coffee machine that looked like it belonged in a proper cafe, though my first attempt produced something that tasted faintly of burnt popcorn. I am blaming altitude, or perhaps my own incompetence, or possibly both.

What struck me most in those first few hours was the quiet. Not the uncomfortable, oppressive kind, but the sort that makes you realise how much noise you normally live with. No traffic, no neighbours arguing through thin walls, just the occasional cowbell from somewhere up the hillside and my husband swearing quietly as he tried to work out the recycling system. The Austrians take their waste separation very seriously, and we stood in the utility room for a solid ten minutes holding an empty wine bottle and debating our options like it was some kind of logic puzzle.

By late afternoon, we had established our positions. The children had colonised the living room with a board game that involved far too much shouting. My husband had found the garden furniture and was reading the same page of his book for the third time. I kept wandering out onto the balcony with my questionable coffee, watching the light change on the mountains and wondering why we did not do this sort of thing more often. The answer, of course, is that life gets in the way, and also that I am fundamentally quite lazy about planning.

Dinner that first night was a chaotic assembly of whatever we had brought with us, eaten on the terrace as the temperature dropped and we realised we had packed entirely the wrong clothes. There is something deeply humbling about shivering in August while your children refuse to put on jumpers because "we are on holiday." We retreated inside eventually, full of cheese and bread and that particular satisfaction that comes from having nowhere else to be.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of complete silence, which my brain initially interpreted as broken, and woke up to my husband already making his second attempt at the coffee machine. Some things, I suspect, will improve with practice. Others, like my ability to hold onto my belongings, probably never will.