The sat nav had been insisting for the last twenty minutes that we were "arriving at destination," which was impressive given we were currently crawling up a single-track lane that looked like it had last seen a tractor sometime in the late eighties. My husband Dave was gripping the steering wheel with that particular white-knuckle intensity he reserves for French rural driving, while our two children had descended into the backseat bickering that only a four-hour drive from Limoges airport can produce.

"Left at the stone barn," I read from the owner's directions, which I'd screenshotted in a moment of misplaced confidence at the airport Starbucks.

"There is no left," Dave said, in the flat tone of a man who has been married to me long enough to know this is exactly how our holidays begin.

There was, in fact, a left. It was merely camouflaged by an aggressive hedge and what appeared to be a very relaxed goat. We took it at approximately two miles per hour, the goat watching with evident disdain, and promptly found ourselves in what I can only describe as a farmyard situation. A proper one, with mud and chickens and a tractor that looked like it had been parked there since before I was born.

I will admit that I may have uttered a word that made the children go unhelpfully quiet.

Dave, ever the optimist, was already out of the car and attempting to communicate with an elderly gentleman who had emerged from a stone outbuilding. My French extends to ordering wine and apologising, sometimes simultaneously, so I stayed put and pretended to be very interested in a text message from my mother about her hydrangeas.

Ten minutes later we were back on the correct track, having learned that the goat is apparently a known local hazard with a taste for confusing tourists. The gentleman, it turned out, was not the owner but a neighbour who found the whole thing tremendously amusing. I chose to take this as a good omen.

The Ceaux d'Allegre itself appeared around the final bend like something from a particularly persuasive travel brochure. A solid stone farmhouse with that weathered, honey-coloured look that no amount of British DIY could ever replicate, it sat in a garden that had clearly been loved into submission over many years. Lavender lined the path. A fig tree heavy with fruit leaned companionably against the wall. Somewhere, a dog barked once and thought better of it.

The key was exactly where promised, in a little metal box with a combination that our youngest had memorised and immediately forgotten. Dave got it on the third attempt while I stood there holding groceries and feeling the particular sun of the Auvergne on my face, that high, clear warmth that makes everything feel slightly more possible than it did before.

The door opened with the satisfying weight of something properly old. Inside, the house smelled of wood polish and dried lavender and that particular stillness that comes from thick stone walls. The kitchen was enormous, with a fireplace you could practically stand in and a table that had clearly hosted decades of family meals. Our daughter immediately claimed the window seat. Our son discovered the staircase and began thundering up and down it with the energy of someone who has been car-bound since dawn.

I found myself standing in the doorway to the garden, holding a bag of baguettes that had gone slightly squashed in the sat nav fiasco, watching Dave attempt to decode the outdoor barbecue with the solemn concentration of a man approaching a nuclear launch code. The neighbour's dog had wandered over to supervise. The fig tree rustled in a breeze I hadn't noticed before.

There is a particular moment in family holidays, I have learned, when the chaos of arrival finally stills and you realise you have somehow, despite everything, arrived exactly where you needed to be. Mine came right then, squashed bread and all, with Dave swearing softly at a charcoal bag and the children already arguing about who had the better bedroom.

I poured a glass of the wine we'd picked up in a supermarket panic and sat on the stone step, feet in the grass, and watched the evening begin to settle over the hills. The goat, thankfully, was nowhere to be seen.