I should have known the holiday was off to a classic start when I confidently turned left off the ferry at Caen and immediately found myself in a roundabout that spat me out towards a hypermarket car park. Sat nav Jane, as I have affectionately named her, had apparently decided that "La Croupte" near Saint-Charles-de-Percy was a state of mind rather than an actual location. Three loops of the same junction and one heated debate with myself later, I was back on the D562, clutching a bag of slightly melted madeleines from the supermarket and muttering about the romance of French road signs.

The drive south through the Calvados countryside did settle my nerves, I must admit. The hedgerows grew taller, the lanes narrower, and the occasional Norman cow peered over a gate with that particular bovine expression of mild judgment. I passed through villages where the stone houses sat squat and grey against the green, each one looking like it had been there since someone first thought "I fancy a bit of cider and a quiet life." The late afternoon light was doing that golden thing it does in Normandy, all soft and forgiving, which was just as well given the state of my hair after four hours of ferry air and motorway wind.

Then came the lane. The website had mentioned a private drive, which in my London-trained brain suggested something with a gentle curve and perhaps a tasteful gravel crunch. What I got was a track that narrowed between two banks until my wing mirrors were practically brushing the cow parsley. I inched forward, wincing at every twig snap against the paintwork, convinced I was about to emerge into someone's farmyard and have to perform an awkward reversing manoeuvre in front of a French farmer who would rightly wonder why the English cannot read maps.

I did emerge into a farmyard, as it happened. A very small one, with a barn and some agricultural equipment that looked older than my grandmother. But beyond it, tucked against a slope with a view that made me actually say "oh" out loud, was La Croupte itself. Stone walls, dark timber framing, a roof that sagged just enough to suggest character rather than crisis. The sort of place that looks like it has absorbed centuries of Norman weather and come out of it with a stubborn shrug.

The key was where the owner had said it would be, in a little metal box that required the code I had written on my phone, which had now died. Cue ten minutes of rummaging through my bag, finding three chargers, two of the wrong type, and finally the scrap of paper with the numbers on it that I had sensibly tucked into my passport. The door opened with a satisfyingly solid weight, and I stepped inside to that particular smell of old stone and wood polish that makes you think immediately of fires and red wine.

I will not pretend the first moments were entirely graceful. I tripped over the step down into the kitchen, which the photos had not quite conveyed, and sent my madeleines skittering across the flagstones. The living room, with its exposed beams and the wood-burner sitting there like a promise, received me with what I can only describe as amused patience. I stood there, slightly breathless, crumbs on my shoe, and looked out through the window at the valley rolling away towards woods I would later learn were full of proper Norman walking paths.

The bathroom, I discovered after some exploration, had a shower with water pressure that could strip paint. The bedrooms upstairs had ceilings that required a slight duck from anyone over five foot eight, which I am, and which I forgot approximately every third time I moved between rooms. But the bed was made with crisp linen, and somewhere outside a bird was doing that evening song that sounds like it is showing off.

I unpacked badly, as I always do, leaving clothes in heaps and immediately needing something from the bottom of my case. I made tea with the kettle I had sensibly brought, because I am English and some things are not negotiable. I sat on the little wooden bench outside the front door, cup in hand, and watched the light change over the fields while a tractor rumbled somewhere distant and the madeleine incident slowly became funny rather than merely clumsy.

That first hour at La Croupte was a small chaos of wrong turns, dead batteries, and pastry casualties. Yet sitting there, with the quiet settling in and the stone walls warm from the day's sun, I felt that particular shift that happens when a place stops being a destination and starts becoming somewhere you might actually relax. I had arrived, more or less intact, to a converted farmhouse in the Norman hills that did not care about my roundabout failures or my dishevelled state. It simply waited, patient and slightly amused, for me to catch up with where I was.