I have never been so relieved to see a gravel driveway in my life. After six hours in the car with two children, a boot full of supermarket shopping, and what I can only describe as a catastrophic navigation error involving a roundabout near Bordeaux, we finally crunched to a halt outside our holiday home in Leognan. The mishap? I had spent forty-five minutes confidently following signs to what I believed was our village, only to discover I had been driving towards Leognan-sur-Innocence, a place that does not exist. I had misread the sat nav. My wife found this considerably more amusing than I did.

The property sat behind a low stone wall with a garden that looked as though someone had lovingly tended it right up until the moment they remembered they had a plane to catch. Roses clambered over a wooden arch, lavender bushes hummed with bees, and a child's bicycle lay on its side near the terrace, which gave the place an immediately lived-in feel. I liked that. No sterile hotel gloss, just the comfortable chaos of a family home that happens to be letting itself out for the summer.

The key was where they said it would be, in a little metal box that required the code I had written on my phone, then on a napkin, then on my hand after the napkin got used to wipe ice cream. The door opened with that satisfying resistance of old French woodwork, the kind that sticks slightly in humidity and announces your arrival whether you want it to or not. We practically fell inside, the children already bickering about who would claim which bedroom.

The first thing that struck me was the smell. Wood polish, dried herbs hanging in the kitchen, and something faintly of stone that only old buildings in this part of France seem to possess. The living room opened directly onto that terrace through glass doors, and I could see straight through to the garden where a fig tree dropped its fruit onto the lawn with soft, rhythmic thuds. My daughter immediately declared she would collect them all. My son immediately declared he would climb the tree. Neither happened in the way they imagined.

The kitchen was compact but properly equipped, not one of those holiday rentals where you open a drawer to find a single bent fork and a can opener from 1973. I spotted a proper coffee pot, the stove-top kind, and felt a small surge of optimism. I am not a natural morning person, but the promise of decent coffee on that terrace, watching the sun come up over the vineyard that bordered the garden, seemed like something I could commit to. Whether I actually managed it is another story entirely.

The bedrooms were upstairs, the wooden steps creaking pleasantly underfoot. Our room had a window that looked out over the same vineyard, rows of green stretching away towards a line of pines in the distance. The children's room had bunk beds, which they treated with the reverence usually reserved for theme park attractions. Within ten minutes they had established a complex system of rules about who used the ladder when, which I knew would collapse by bedtime.

By late afternoon we had unpacked with the haphazard energy of people who have been in a car too long. Swim things got dumped in the wrong rooms, food went into cupboards with no system whatsoever, and I realised I had bought three types of cheese but no bread. This is apparently my signature move. My wife raised an eyebrow but said nothing, which was somehow worse.

I found myself on that terrace eventually, a lukewarm beer from the fridge in hand, watching the light change over the garden. The children had discovered a ping pong table in the garage and were engaged in a game that bore only passing resemblance to actual table tennis. A cat from somewhere down the lane had wandered in to observe, settling on the wall with the entitlement of a creature who knows this is technically its territory.

That first evening we walked to the bakery in the village, a proper boulangerie where the woman behind the counter tolerated my rusty French with good humour. The baguette was still warm. We ate simple things on the terrace as the sun went down, the children filthy from garden exploration, my wife and I too tired to enforce proper table manners. It was not sophisticated. It was not ambitious. It was exactly what we needed.

I thought about that wrong turn as I sat there, the extra miles, the mild panic, the children asking if we were lost. Perhaps I had needed those forty-five minutes of going the wrong way to appreciate arriving at the right place. Or perhaps I should just admit I cannot read a sat nav and leave it at that. Either way, Leognan had us now, and for the next week, this slightly chaotic stone house with its fig tree and its creaking stairs was ours to make a mess of. We were absolutely ready.