I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send us through what looked like someone's back garden in rural West Flanders. There we were, three hours into our drive from Calais, the kids in the back asking if we were nearly there for the forty-seventh time, and suddenly we're bouncing down a farm track between two fields of very unimpressed-looking cows. My husband Mark shot me that look, the one that says "you booked this place," and I did what any sensible person would do: laughed hysterically while frantically waving my phone about for signal.

Turns out the actual road was about two hundred yards to our left, hidden behind a hedge. We arrived at the cottage in Diksmuide with slightly rattled nerves and a car that now smelled distinctly of countryside, which the children found hilarious and I chose to ignore.

The cottage itself, when we finally found it, was one of those solid Flemish brick houses that immediately makes you feel like you've stepped into a proper home rather than a rental. Whitewashed walls, a steep little roof, and a front garden that someone had clearly loved at some point but was now having what I can only describe as an identity crisis. Mark attempted to reverse up the narrow drive, hit a flowerpot with an ominous crunch, and declared that he was officially done with driving for the foreseeable future. I did not argue.

The key was in one of those little lockboxes that always make me feel like I'm breaking into my own holiday, and I fumbled with it for an embarrassingly long time while a neighbour watched from his window with what I can only hope was sympathy rather than amusement. When the door finally swung open, the smell hit us: that particular combination of old wood, cleaning products, and something faintly yeasty that I later realised was the brewery smell drifting over from somewhere nearby. Diksmuide, I would discover, takes its beer very seriously indeed.

The children thundered upstairs to claim bedrooms, which left Mark and me standing in the kitchen with our suitcases and a sudden realisation that we had absolutely no idea how anything worked. The hob appeared to run on some mysterious gas system that required a ritual involving matches and prayer. The kettle was one of those old-fashioned stove-top numbers that I'd seen in films but never actually used. I filled it and put it on, feeling absurdly proud of myself, then spent ten minutes wondering why it wasn't boiling before Mark gently pointed out that I'd put it on the wrong ring.

By the time we'd unpacked the essentials and the kids had reappeared demanding to know what was for dinner, I'd managed to produce a cup of tea that tasted faintly of gas and optimism. We walked into the town centre, barely five minutes away, and found a friterie where we stood in the queue like proper locals, paper cones of chips in hand, watching the evening light turn the Gothic tower of the town hall a ridiculous shade of golden pink.

That first night, we sat in the little garden at the back of the cottage, the kids finally quiet after their chip-induced carbohydrate coma, and I listened to the strange silence of a place that wasn't home. Somewhere a church bell struck the hour. A bicycle went past with that particular clicking sound they make. Mark poured us both a beer from a bottle he'd grabbed at the corner shop, and we clinked glasses with the profound satisfaction of people who had survived their own incompetence and arrived somewhere lovely in spite of themselves.

I thought about that wrong turn in the cow field, the crushed flowerpot, the kettle fiasco. The whole journey had been a catalogue of minor disasters, and yet here we were, already half in love with a town I'd barely heard of a month ago, watching our children chase moths in a garden in Flanders. Sometimes the wrong turn is exactly what you need, even if it does make the car smell funny for days afterwards.