I had always thought I was rather good at directions until we tried to find our holiday cottage in Guisseny. Three hours from Roscoff, a quick stop for a galette in Morlaix, and then somehow I managed to turn a twenty-minute drive into a scenic tour of every single lane in northern Finistere. My phone declared it had lost all hope around the third cattle grid, and my wife developed that particular expression she saves for when I insist I know exactly where we are. The children had begun a competitive game of who could spot the most abandoned tractors when I finally admitted defeat and knocked on a farmhouse door. The farmer, bless him, didn't even look surprised. He just pointed down a track I had dismissed as a driveway to a shed and said something in Breton that I choose to believe was sympathetic.

The cottage itself appeared through a gap in the hedgerow like something from a storybook, if storybooks included slightly frantic families in a dusty Peugeot. Stone walls, blue shutters, a garden that had clearly decided to do its own thing for several decades. My wife stepped out and took a deep breath of that particular coastal air that smells of gorse and the sea and something faintly agricultural. The children had already vanished around the back, drawn by the promise of a garden they could explore without me hovering.

The key was where they said it would be, which felt like a small miracle given my navigational performance. The door opened with that satisfying weight old doors have, and we stepped into a kitchen that managed to be both spacious and immediately cosy. Beamed ceiling, a proper cooker that looked like it had seen several generations of holiday attempts at moules mariniere, and a table already set with a checked cloth that made me feel we ought to be eating something rustic immediately. My daughter announced she was starving in the tone of someone who had been rationed for weeks rather than someone who had consumed an entire crepe not two hours before.

I will confess that my first act of proper exploration was to locate the coffee maker. Priorities. The sitting room had that wonderful slightly mismatched charm of a place that has accumulated furniture rather than bought it in a set. A sofa that promised afternoon naps, bookshelves with the obligatory collection of yellowed paperbacks in French that I would definitely read this time, and windows that framed the garden like paintings. Through one, I could see my son attempting to climb something that was either a very small tree or a very large shrub, with the committed enthusiasm of a boy who has been in a car too long.

The garden itself became our evening territory. A barbecue that looked like it had witnessed many optimistic attempts at fish, a lawn that sloped just enough to make football interesting, and beyond the hedge, fields that rolled down towards the coast. We could hear the sea, though we couldn't see it yet, that rhythmic presence that would become the background to the whole week. My wife found the deckchairs and immediately claimed one with the territorial instinct of someone who had done most of the packing.

That first evening, we walked the ten minutes to the nearest beach as the light was fading. The children ran ahead, chasing each other through dunes covered in marram grass, while we followed at the pace of people who had finally stopped moving luggage from one place to another. The beach at Guisseny revealed itself in that particular Breton way, not sandy postcard perfection but something wilder and more interesting, rock pools and shale and the Atlantic doing its dramatic thing against the shore. My son fell in immediately, because of course he did, and emerged with a seaweed accessory and a grin that suggested this was exactly what he had hoped for.

Back at the cottage, we made a supper of bread and cheese and things from the Super U in Lannilis that I had found during my earlier unintended tour of the area. The children fell asleep at the table, which I choose to regard as a sign of successful parenting rather than exhaustion. My wife and I sat with wine that cost embarrassingly little and listened to the silence, that particular rural silence that isn't silence at all but full of small night noises and the distant sea.

I had worried, driving those wrong lanes, that I had somehow got the holiday wrong before it began. That the getting lost was a sign, that the cottage would be disappointing, that the children would be bored within a day. Instead, I sat in a deckchair in a garden in Brittany, slightly chilly in the evening air, watching bats emerge from somewhere near the eaves, and felt that particular loosening that only happens when you stop trying to make things perfect and let them be what they are. We had arrived, finally, in every sense that mattered.