I have never been so relieved to see a gravel driveway in all my life. Three hours from Caen, two wrong turns near Bayeux, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted our gite was somewhere in the middle of a cabbage field. We were not in a cabbage field. We were, according to a helpful man walking his dog, "not even close, madame."

The gite itself sat at the end of a lane lined with cow parsley and the occasional suspicious chicken. A proper Normandy longhouse, all timber and pale stone, with a roof that looked like it had been tiled by someone who really enjoyed their lunch breaks. I fell in love with it instantly. My partner, still sulking about the cabbage field incident, needed convincing.

The key was supposedly in a lockbox. The lockbox was supposedly behind a loose stone near the water butt. The water butt, we discovered after ten minutes of increasingly frantic searching, had recently been moved by the owners for repair. The key, it turned out, was now in a flowerpot. A specific flowerpot. None of the flowerpots had labels, which felt like an oversight for a property that otherwise thought to provide a welcome pack of local camembert.

I tried three pots before a spider the size of a fifty pence piece made the decision for me. I yelped. The key fell out. My partner laughed for the first time since Bayeux.

Stepping inside, the smell hit me before anything else. Woodsmoke and beeswax, that particular damp-wood scent of old buildings that have seen a few centuries come and go. The living room had a fireplace you could practically stand in, and someone had left a modest pile of logs ready for the evening. The furniture was that comfortable sort of worn, not shabby but settled, like it had found its place and intended to keep it.

I immediately walked into a low oak beam. This would become a theme of the weekend.

The kitchen was small and square and clearly designed by someone who cooked once a year at Christmas. The fridge hummed with the determination of an appliance that had been running since the nineties. But there was a proper gas hob, a kettle that actually boiled quickly, and windows overlooking a garden that rolled down to a hedgerow thick with blackberries. I could work with this. I could absolutely work with this.

The bedroom upstairs had sloped ceilings that made me feel briefly nautical, and a bed that creaked with theatrical enthusiasm at every movement. The bathroom managed to be both freezing and charming, with a towel rail that heated up approximately never and a mirror that showed me exactly how three hours of driving had treated my hair. Not well, as it turned out.

By the time we had lugged our bags in, argued about which bedroom to take, and discovered that I had packed three phone chargers but no shampoo, the afternoon light was turning that particular Normandy gold. You know the sort, hazy and slow, making everything look like a slightly smug postcard.

I stood in the garden with a cup of tea that I had made with milk from a local farm shop we had passed, and I listened. Cows somewhere distant, a tractor fading, birds I could not name being absolutely furious about something. The chaos of arrival was settling into something else, something quieter and more solid.

I had walked into a beam, shrieked at a spider, and temporarily lost my mind in a cabbage field. And I was already wondering how soon we could come back.