I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, if only to give you something to laugh about later. Our recent trip to Vienna proved me absolutely right.

The train from the airport had been blissfully smooth. My partner, Mark, had spent the journey smugly reading out facts from his phone about Vienna's public transport efficiency, as if he had personally built the U-Bahn. I nodded along, already dreaming of Sachertorte and pretending I understood what he meant by "integrated transit network." We changed at Praterstern without incident, glided along the U1 line, and emerged at Kagran with the confident swagger of people who had definitely, absolutely mastered this city already.

Then we tried to find the property.

The directions had seemed straightforward enough. Left at the station, past the shopping centre, through a small park. Simple. Except I had somehow managed to save the wrong building number into my phone, and Mark was following my lead with the unquestioning faith of a man who had not yet learned from fourteen years of my navigational catastrophes. We marched past the correct street twice, each time growing more convinced that we were being punished for some unknown sin. My wheeled suitcase developed a personality disorder and began pulling to the left with increasing aggression, like a stubborn shopping trolley with a grudge.

The true comedy began when I attempted to ask a local for directions. My German extends to approximately twelve words, most of them food-related. I approached a kindly-looking woman walking her dog and managed to produce something that sounded, to my ears, like a reasonable request for assistance. She blinked at me. Her dog blinked at me. I had apparently asked her whether her refrigerator was running, or possibly declared my love for her eyebrows. Mark, standing three metres behind me, had developed a sudden fascination with a nearby tree and was making suspicious coughing noises.

We found the property twenty minutes later, naturally located precisely where we had first started looking. I stood in the lift, sweating slightly, my hair having achieved what Mark politely called "travel volume," and felt that peculiar mixture of exhaustion and triumph that accompanies every arrival I have ever made anywhere.

The door opened, and I forgot everything.

The flat was not grand or ostentatious. It was better than that. It was immediately, recognisably, comfortingly Viennese. High ceilings that seemed to invite deeper breaths. Large windows that framed the Donaustadt district with an almost casual generosity, as if the city were simply showing off a little. I walked to the glass and stood there like a fool, watching the evening light settle over the area, feeling suddenly and unexpectedly moved by how peaceful it all seemed after my chaotic entrance.

Mark appeared beside me with two cups of terrible instant coffee he had found in the kitchen cupboard. "Your finest work," he said, handing me one, and I knew he meant the getting-lost business, not the beverage. I sipped it anyway, standing in that unfamiliar living room that already felt borrowed from someone's properly organised life.

I thought about how I always do this. The panic, the wrong turns, the unnecessary drama of my own making. And yet here we were, slightly rumpled, definitely ridiculous, but arrived. The mishaps would become the story we told first, the thing that made the place stick in memory more than any perfect journey ever could.

The morning would bring the proper exploration. The Donauzentrum shopping centre practically next door, the green spaces of the district, the tram connections to the old city waiting patiently for us. For now, I was content to stand at that window with my dreadful coffee, watching Vienna settle into evening, already half in love with a place I had barely seen.

Some arrivals are graceful. Mine never are. But they get me where I need to be, eventually, and sometimes that is enough.