I should have known the sat-nav was up to no good when it started pronouncing Louargat as "Loo-ar-gat" with a hard T, like some sort of sneeze. Three hours from Roscoff and my partner Dave was already threatening to throw it out the window, which would have been a shame since we'd only bought it last spring for a trip to the Lakes that ended with us accidentally touring a sewage works near Kendal.

The mishap, though. The real mishap. We'd stopped at a Super U in Morlaix for essentials - bread, cheese, wine, the holy trinity - and I'd spotted what I thought was local cider in a charmingly rustic bottle. "Grab four," Dave said, ever the optimist. It was only when we pulled up to the stone cottage, gravel crunching under the tyres, that I realised I'd bought four litres of apple vinegar. Four litres. The woman at the till had probably thought we were starting a chip shop. There was Dave, standing in the doorway of this lovely Breton longere, holding a baguette like a sword and asking where I'd put the proper drinks. I buried my face in my hands and laughed until my ribs hurt.

The property itself sat at the end of a lane so narrow I genuinely thought we'd taken a wrong turn into someone's farmyard. A low stone wall, mossy and crumbling in that picturesque way the French seem to manage effortlessly, marked the boundary. The garden sloped away towards fields that rolled on like a green sea, and in the distance I could just make out what I later learned were the hills around the Trieux valley. No sea view, but that particular quality of light you get in northern Brittany, soft and watery even when the sun's doing its best.

Dave wrestled with the key safe while I stood there feeling increasingly ridiculous in my travel-wrinkled clothes, clutching a carrier bag of vinegar like some kind of condiment-based offering. The lock clicked. We stepped inside.

The smell hit first - that particular stillness of a house that's been waiting, wood and old plaster and something faintly herbal from the beams. The owners had left the shutters half-open and dust motes swirled in the afternoon light. A long farmhouse table dominated the kitchen, scarred and solid, the sort that has witnessed decades of meals. I ran my hand along it and felt immediately, stupidly emotional. Travel does that to me, the sudden intimacy of standing in someone else's space, borrowing their life for a week.

Dave was already investigating the fireplace, muttering about logs and draft. I wandered through to the sitting room, where a sofa in that particular faded floral pattern universal to French holiday lets sagged invitingly. Books lined one wall, mostly in French, a few battered paperbacks in English left by previous guests. I pulled out a Patricia Highsmith and smiled.

The garden revealed itself properly the next morning, but those first hours were all about settling into the rhythm of the place. We found the barbecue rusted but functional, the outdoor furniture slightly wobbly, a child's drawing pinned to the fridge from some family who'd stayed before. I stuck our vinegar bottles in a row on the windowsill like a shrine to my own incompetence. Dave made a supper of bread and cheese and the one bottle of actual wine we'd brought from home, and we sat at that long table as darkness gathered outside, not speaking much, just being there.

I kept thinking about that sat-nav voice, the way it had guided us wrong twice on the way from Morlaix, down lanes where brambles scratched the car's paint. How we'd argued, then laughed, then argued again. How none of it mattered now, with the quiet pressing in and the unfamiliar creak of an unfamiliar house settling around us. The mishaps were already becoming stories, even as they happened. That's the thing about arriving somewhere new - you're so thoroughly yourself, stripped of routine, that every small failure feels magnified and somehow precious.

Dave fell asleep in the floral sofa around ten, mouth open, snoring gently. I stayed up, listening to an owl somewhere in the trees beyond the garden, feeling the particular loneliness of being awake in a strange house and not minding it at all. The vinegar bottles caught the moonlight. I decided we'd use them, all of them, somehow. Dressings for salads we'd buy at the market in Guingamp. A grand vinaigrette experiment. We'd make it part of the week, this ridiculous mistake.

Morning would bring the proper exploration - the lane down to the village, the boulangerie run, the slow discovery of what this corner of Brittany offered. But that first night was just arrival, pure and simple and slightly chaotic, the two of us finding our footing in a place that asked nothing of us except presence. I wrote "vinegar" on the shopping list, meaning wine, then laughed and left it. Some mistakes you keep, just for the story.