The SatNav had other ideas about how to reach Vienne-en-Arthies, which is how I found myself wedged down a lane barely wider than a baguette, trying to explain to a very patient French farmer why I was attempting a three-point turn next to his field of confused-looking cows. My wife was doing that silent laughing thing where she goes bright red and makes no noise, and the kids had already started a game of who could spot the most panicked wildlife. I had not planned for this level of agricultural intimacy before even reaching our holiday cottage.

We had set off from Calais with the usual overpacked car, every crevice stuffed with things we definitely did not need. I had brought three types of raincoat for a four-night stay, which tells you everything about my optimism levels. The drive through Ile-de-France should have been straightforward, but I had made the classic error of trusting technology over common sense. The cottage was near Vienne-en-Arthies, a small commune northwest of Paris, nestled in the quiet bend of the Seine where the river meanders through orchards and meadows. The sort of place where you expect to hear church bells and not much else.

When we finally arrived, rattled and slightly hysterical, the stone cottage sat there looking impossibly calm, as if it had been waiting centuries for people exactly like us to turn up flustered and overburdened. It was one of those traditional properties with weathered shutters and a garden that had clearly known better days but wore its shabbiness with pride. My daughter immediately claimed the swing seat, which groaned ominously but held. My son disappeared round the back to investigate a shed that probably contained gardening equipment older than his grandparents.

The key was in the lockbox, which I fumbled with for an embarrassing length of time while a neighbour watched from her window with the kind of amused detachment I have come to recognise as very French. When the door finally gave, we stepped into a kitchen that smelled of wood polish and yesterday's coffee, with terracotta tiles underfoot and a table that had supported decades of family meals. There was a moment, standing there with my ridiculous collection of raincoats and my farmer-traumatised expression, where I felt the particular relief of having arrived somewhere that asks nothing of you except to slow down.

I made tea with the dusty kettle while the children conducted a full inventory of the bedrooms, reporting back with the urgency of estate agents. The garden, they announced, contained a barbecue of questionable stability and a hammock that would definitely feature in someone's accident later in the week. They were not wrong about the hammock. By evening I had already performed an unplanned dismount that my wife described as "surprisingly graceful for a man your age," which I chose to take as a compliment.

That first night we walked down to the river as the light faded, the path bordered by cow parsley and the occasional startled rabbit. The Seine here is nothing like the grand affair it becomes in Paris; it is narrower, sleepier, more inclined to linger. We watched a heron stand motionless in the shallows, presumably waiting for something more interesting than our family to come along. The children threw stones with the terrible accuracy of the under-tens, and I felt the particular pleasure of being somewhere where the evening's main entertainment was simply watching the water move.

Back at the cottage, we attempted a barbecue with the wobbly apparatus, producing sausages of variable cookedness and a general atmosphere of mild peril. Eating outside as the darkness gathered, with moths investigating our plates and the distant sound of someone else's dinner preparations drifting across the fields, I understood something I often forget. The holidays I remember are never the polished ones. They are the slightly chaotic arrivals, the failed technology, the moments where you realise you have packed all wrong and it absolutely does not matter.

The farmer, I hope, has recovered. The cows have probably moved on. And I have learned that the direct route is rarely the one worth writing about.