I have never been so relieved to see a gravel driveway in all my life. After six hours of driving from the Eurotunnel, two wrong turns near Montpellier, and one spectacular argument with the sat nav that ended with me shouting "you absolute turnip" at a small screen, we finally crunched up to our Carnas in Languedoc-Roussillon. The sun was doing that golden late-afternoon thing, the cicadas were already having their evening rave, and I had that particular smugness of someone who had remembered to pack the tea bags.

Then I opened the car door and promptly fell out.

Not a dramatic fall, mind you. More of a slow-motion slide, really. My left foot had gone to sleep somewhere around Nimes, and I discovered this only when attempting to stand with the dignity of a man who definitely knows what he is doing. I did not know what I was doing. I flailed, I grabbed the door frame, I made a noise like a startled goose. My youngest, sat in the back with her tablet, didn't even look up. "Dad's fallen over," she announced to no one in particular, in the same tone she might use for "it's Tuesday."

My wife, already at the front door wrestling with the key safe, offered a sympathetic snort.

The Carnas itself, once I'd hobbled over with what I hoped looked like intentional swagger, turned out to be one of those solid stone houses that the French seem to knock up without really trying. Thick walls, wooden shutters, that particular smell of cool stone and distant lavender. The key safe finally surrendered after my wife employed some language she definitely didn't teach at the primary school where she works, and we stepped inside to that wonderful hush of a holiday house waiting to be lived in.

I will confess to a small, shameful thought: please let the photos be accurate. They were, mostly. The kitchen was properly equipped, not one of those holiday rental situations where you get one blunt knife and a wooden spoon that has seen things. The sitting room had actual comfortable sofas, the sort you can properly sink into, not those ornamental French affairs that punish you for wanting to sit down. French doors opened onto a terrace with a view of rolling vineyards and, crucially, a barbecue that looked like it meant business.

The children had already vanished to investigate the pool, which we could hear before we saw, their shrieks echoing off the stone. I wandered after them, still working the pins and needles out of my foot, and found them already in their costumes despite not having unpacked a single bag. The pool was that perfect turquoise, surrounded by terracotta tiles and those spiky plants that I can never remember the name of but always associate with proper heat.

My wife appeared with two cold beers, because she is a woman who understands priorities. We stood there, watching the children cannonball with the relentless energy of the young, and I felt something in my shoulders actually loosen. The drive, the sat nav, the foot-fall, all of it started to dissolve into that particular holiday feeling where normal rules don't apply and cheese for lunch is not just acceptable but practically mandatory.

"Nice, isn't it?" she said.

I looked at the vineyards, at the stone house settling into the evening, at a gecko darting across the terrace wall. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, it really is."

The children demanded pizza for dinner, because of course they did. We found a place in the nearby village, nothing fancy, just a proper wood-fired oven and a terrace under plane trees. The walk there took longer than expected because we kept stopping to look at things, at the way the light hit the old buildings, at a cat watching us from a windowsill, at the absolute foreignness of being somewhere that wasn't home.

I think that is the real pleasure of it, the Carnas and the Languedoc and all of it. Not the big moments, not the bucket list nonsense. Just the slow unfolding of ordinary days in an extraordinary place, the fall out of the car and the cold beer and the children shrieking in a pool while the sun goes down over vineyards that have been there for centuries. We went back to the house full of pizza and goodwill, the children already half-asleep, and I sat on that terrace for another hour just listening to the night settle in.

The foot still twinged a bit when I stood up. Small price to pay, really.