The satnav had been insisting for a good twenty minutes that we had arrived, which was deeply unhelpful given that we were clearly staring at a field of very indifferent sunflowers. My partner, who had appointed himself navigator despite having the directional sense of a confused pigeon, kept jabbing at the screen and muttering about French postcodes being a moral failing. I suggested we might, in fact, need to be *in* Sarlat-la-Caneda rather than merely near it philosophically. He did not appreciate this observation.

We had set off from the ferry at Caen at what can only be described as an ungodly hour, fueled by motorway coffee and a shared determination to reach the Dordogne before nightfall. The plan was elegant in its simplicity: arrive, locate our holiday home, open wine, collapse. Reality, as ever, had other ideas.

The first mishap occurred at a petrol station somewhere between Limoges and nowhere, where I confidently filled the tank with the wrong grade of diesel. Or rather, I did not fill it at all, having somehow selected the premium option that cost roughly the same per litre as a decent Bordeaux, then panicked and returned the nozzle with such haste that I splattered my own sandals. My partner watched this performance with the particular expression of someone who has just remembered they chose this life voluntarily.

By the time we actually found Sarlat-la-Caneda, the golden hour was doing something genuinely unfair to the honey-coloured stone buildings, and I will admit to a small catch in my throat. The old town rose up in that layered, accidental way that makes English market towns feel almost apologetic by comparison. Even the car park seemed to have been arranged with an eye to beauty, which was fortunate as we spent a good ten minutes circling it, still unable to locate our specific turning.

The holiday home itself sat on a quiet residential lane just beyond the medieval core, close enough to walk into town for morning croissants but tucked away from the tourist bustle. We finally spotted it by the distinctive wooden shutters that the listing had promised, though the listing had notably failed to mention the extremely committed lavender bush that had colonised most of the front path. I tripped on this immediately, catching myself on my partner's arm with a gracelessness that sent both our bags sliding into the gravel. The neighbours, watering their window boxes with textbook French nonchalance, did not look up. I choose to believe this was politeness rather than familiarity with British holidaymakers.

The key was where promised, in a small lockbox that required a code I had written on a crumpled receipt now buried somewhere in the footwell. Twenty minutes of undignified rummaging later, the door swung open and we stood in a cool tiled hallway that smelled faintly of beeswax and the particular mineral scent of old stone. The kitchen opened to our left, modest but properly equipped with the serious pans and sharp knives that separate French holiday lets from their English equivalents. I ran a hand along the wooden countertop and felt something unknot in my shoulders that had been tight since Portsmouth.

The sitting room faced south onto a small walled garden where a fig tree dropped its leaves with lazy precision onto a weathered table. Beyond the wall, I could hear the muffled clatter of someone else's dinner preparations, that intimate sound of village life going on regardless. My partner had found the bedroom upstairs and was making satisfied noises about the bed being actually large enough for humans, a rarity in our experience of continental accommodation.

I stood in the garden for a moment, still in my diesel-scented sandals, and watched the light change on the stone wall. The chaos of the journey already felt slightly ridiculous, one of those stories we would tell with embellishment later. We had arrived. We were slightly broken, somewhat poorer, and I had ruined a perfectly good pair of shoes. But we had arrived, and the fig tree did not care about any of it, and somewhere very close by, someone was opening what sounded like a very promising bottle of wine.