The sat nav gave up on us somewhere past Wels, which should have been our first warning. We'd been driving since Calais, the kids were practising their whining in three-part harmony, and my partner had that particular set to his jaw that meant someone was about to suggest we should have flown to Malaga instead. That someone was me, actually, and I said it out loud, which went down about as well as you'd expect. Still, we pressed on through Upper Austria, following hand-scrawled directions from the cottage owner that included landmarks like "the barn with the wonky cross" and "where Hans keeps his angry goose."

We found the angry goose before we found Hirschalm. It found us, rather, waddling into the road with the entitled air of a creature that knows exactly how much car insurance excess costs these days. My partner swerved. I yelped. The kids cheered as if we'd just completed a stunt from a film. The goose waddled off, utterly unbothered, and we sat there in a lay-by, hearts hammering, wondering if this was the universe telling us something.

The track up to Hirschalm proper nearly finished what the goose started. Our sensible family hatchback was not designed for this sort of adventure. Every rut and stone felt personal, like the mountain itself was testing our commitment. "It's character building," I announced, as the car scraped something that sounded expensive. The children had gone suspiciously quiet, which is never a good sign. When I turned round, the youngest was green. Not metaphorically. Actually green. Travel sickness in the Austrian hills hits different, apparently.

Then we crested the final rise, and there it was. Hirschalm sat nestled in its alpine meadow like something from a picture postcard that you'd normally dismiss as unrealistic. The traditional wooden architecture, the balcony that promised morning coffee with actual mountain views, the quiet that hit you like a physical thing after hours of engine noise and bickering. Even the kids stopped complaining, which might be the highest praise any holiday accommodation has ever received.

The owner, a wiry woman called Greta who looked like she could fell trees before breakfast, was waiting with keys and a smile that suggested she'd heard every sat nav horror story going. She showed us round with the brisk efficiency of someone who respects her own time and yours. The place had that particular smell of old wood and mountain air that no candle company has ever successfully replicated. Rustic, she called it. I call it honest. The kind of place where you notice the craftsmanship in the timber framing because there's nothing flashy to distract you.

I immediately tried to open what I thought was the door to the terrace and walked straight into a broom cupboard. Greta didn't laugh, which I appreciated, though her eyebrow did something eloquent. The actual terrace door was two feet to the left. Obviously. I stood there surrounded by mops, contemplating my own competence, while my family dissolved into giggles on the proper side of the correct door.

That first evening, we didn't do much of anything, which was the whole point. The kids discovered the garden slope was excellent for rolling down. I discovered that Austrian supermarket wine tastes better at altitude. My partner discovered that he could, in fact, light a proper wood-burning stove without setting fire to anything important. We ate bread and cheese on that terrace as the light went soft and golden across the meadows, and somewhere in the distance a cowbell clanked with the reassuring rhythm of a place that has never hurried for anyone.

The sat nav failure, the angry goose, the broom cupboard incident, the green child, all of it felt already like part of the story we'd tell later rather than genuine disasters. That's the thing about arriving somewhere that actually fits the promise, I suppose. The chaos becomes colour. The mishaps become memories before they've even properly finished happening.

I sat there with my slightly too warm wine, watching my children argue about who had grass stains on their trousers, and thought about how often I plan holidays within an inch of their lives, desperate to extract maximum value from every moment. Here, the value was in the not-doing. In the sitting still. In the letting a place be what it is rather than what I needed it to become.

Greta had left fresh milk in the fridge and a note saying the nearest proper shop was in Grunau im Almtal, about twenty minutes of careful driving away. We had enough for breakfast, for slow coffee on that balcony, for another day of not much at all. The mountains didn't care about our plans. The goose certainly didn't. And for a week, wonderfully, neither did we.