The Satnav Sends You Round the Bend

We had been driving since dawn, which in family terms means we'd left the Midlands at half six after the traditional row about whether we'd turned the gas off. Seven hours, two service station paninis, and one spectacular argument about whose turn it was to choose the music later, we were finally in Franche-Comte. The Jura mountains were doing their best to look dramatic in the afternoon light, all misty ridges and proper storybook forests, and I was feeling rather pleased with myself for having booked somewhere with actual character instead of another beige holiday park.

Then the satnav happened.

"Turn left," it announced confidently, directing us down what I can only describe as a glorified goat track. My husband, who trusts technology more than his own wife, obeyed immediately. Ten minutes of wincing as branches scraped the hire car, followed by a deeply undignified three-point turn on a slope that felt practically vertical, and we emerged back onto the proper road. Turns out the actual turning was another two hundred yards along, clearly marked, with a perfectly sensible gravel drive. I said nothing. My silence was deafening. He knows what he did.

The gite at Aresches sits among rolling meadows with woods creeping up the hills behind it, the sort of landscape that makes you want to attempt watercolours despite having no artistic ability whatsoever. It's a traditional Franc-Comtois farmhouse conversion, all honey-coloured stone and proper shutters, with a covered terrace where someone had clearly spent time getting the wisteria to behave itself. The owners had left the key in the agreed spot, which felt thrillingly illicit, like we were breaking in rather than paying guests.

Opening the door, that particular hush of a house that's been waiting. Cool stone floors, wooden beams you have to learn to duck under, a kitchen that smelled faintly of the lavender someone had hung in the pantry. My daughter shot upstairs to claim bedrooms, a process involving much bouncing on mattresses and a heated debate about who got the one with the little balcony overlooking the meadow. My son discovered the washing machine and asked, with genuine confusion, why we'd brought him somewhere with chores.

I found myself standing in the kitchen, clutching a bag of croissants we'd bought in a village somewhere back along the road, suddenly aware of how tightly I'd been holding my shoulders for the last three hours. The journey mishap felt properly funny now rather than teeth-grindingly irritating. That's the thing about arriving somewhere that immediately feels right - it unpicks the tension you'd been carrying without noticing.

We spent that first evening doing gloriously little. The children explored the garden, reporting back on a very suspicious-looking shed and a plum tree they deemed "probably edible but we're not testing it." My husband and I sat on the terrace with a bottle of local Jura wine, watching the light change over the hills, neither of us mentioning the satnav incident. Much.

Dinner was a chaotic assembly of whatever we'd grabbed from the supermarket - comte cheese obviously, some saucisse de Montbeliard, bread that didn't last five minutes. The children ate with their fingers. Nobody cared. Someone forgot to close the patio door and we spent ten minutes chasing a moth the size of a small aircraft around the sitting room, laughing like idiots.

By the time I fell into bed that night, listening to unfamiliar country silence rather than motorway drone, I was already plotting how to persuade everyone we should do absolutely nothing tomorrow. The farmhouse had worked its particular magic. We were here, we were messy and imperfect and slightly lost, and it was already shaping up to be exactly the sort of holiday we needed.