The sat nav had been insisting we were three minutes away from our holiday cottage in Vaudoy-en-Brie for the best part of twenty minutes, which I now realise should have been my first clue that this was not going to be the seamless arrival I had pictured in my head. I had imagined gliding up a gravel drive, perhaps with some gentle birdsong, maybe even a local baker waving cheerfully from a bicycle. Instead, we were crawling down yet another narrow lane flanked by wheat fields that looked identical to the previous four, my partner gripping the door handle and making that small humming noise she does when she is deciding whether to mention I should have turned left back at the crossroads.

The mishap, when it came, was almost embarrassingly predictable. I had stopped to check the map on my phone, propped against the steering wheel in that way that feels perfectly secure until it absolutely is not. A tractor appeared behind us, as tractors do in these situations, driven by a man whose expression suggested he had seen this exact scene roughly four thousand times before. I panicked slightly, reached for the handbrake, and watched my phone slide gracefully down into the footwell and under the passenger seat, where it wedged itself against an old water bottle I had been meaning to throw away since Dover.

We found the cottage eventually, of course, though I had to reverse fifty metres up the lane to let the tractor pass first, which the driver accepted with the world-weary patience of a man who has reversed many tourists in his time. The property itself sat behind a low stone wall, all honey-coloured brick and shutters that looked freshly painted in that deep forest green you see everywhere in this part of Ile-de-France. My first proper look came while I was still half-inside the car, one leg out, fishing under the seat for my phone with the desperation of someone who has made their bed and must now lie in it.

The key was in a lockbox, the code written in my partner's handwriting on a crumpled bit of paper that had survived the journey in her coat pocket. I punched in the numbers wrong twice, growing increasingly aware of how ridiculous I must look, before she gently took over and opened it on her first attempt. Some things do not need to be discussed out loud.

Stepping inside, the first thing that struck me was the smell. Old wood and something faintly lavender, the kind of scent that makes you immediately conscious of how much your own house probably smells of whatever you had for dinner three days ago. The floors creaked in that satisfying way, not alarming, just conversational, as if the building were remarking on your arrival. I dumped our bags in the hallway with more enthusiasm than grace and wandered through to the kitchen, where a window looked out over a garden that sloped gently down towards more of those wheat fields, golden in the late afternoon light.

My phone was eventually retrieved, incidentally, though not before I had committed to the bit and pretended I had meant to leave it there all along. We stood in that kitchen for a good ten minutes, too tired to properly unpack, drinking water straight from the tap because we had not yet found the shops and because French tap water always feels faintly rebellious to British sensibilities. Somewhere outside, a dog barked once and thought better of it.

That first evening, we did not venture far. Vaudoy-en-Brie is not the sort of place that demands immediate exploration; it reveals itself slowly, or at least that is what I told myself as I sat on the small terrace with a beer from the only shop we had passed, watching the light change over the fields and feeling the particular satisfaction of having arrived somewhere despite your own best efforts to the contrary. The sat nav sat silent in the car, presumably plotting its revenge. I did not care. The wheat fields looked completely different in the golden hour, and I decided this was probably profound enough for one day.