I have never been so relieved to see a village name on a sign as I was when we finally spotted Saint-Samson-de-la-Roque. Three hours from Portsmouth to Caen, smooth as you like, then forty-five minutes of me insisting "I know where I'm going" while my wife silently consulted Google Maps in the passenger seat. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Fiquefleur-Equainville, which I maintain is not a real place but rather a test to see how many vowels a foreigner can panic-pronounce.

The mishap, then. We'd stopped at a Super U in Pont-Audemer for supplies, as one does, loading up on camembert, cider, and what I believed to be butter. Back at the car, I proudly presented my haul. My wife picked up the butter packet, turned it around, and informed me I'd bought baking margarine. For a farmhouse kitchen holiday. In Normandy, where dairy cows practically wander into your garden to offer fresh churnings. I stood there in the carpark, a middle-aged man defeated by yellow packaging, while a French pensioner watched from her Renault with what I can only describe as agricultural pity.

The property itself sits down a narrow lane, the kind where you breathe in when another car passes. Our cottage was one of several converted farm buildings, all honey-coloured stone and proper shutters that actually close, not the decorative nonsense you get in new builds. The key was in a lockbox, which took me ten minutes and some creative Anglo-Saxon language to open. My teenage son filmed the whole thing for posterity, or more likely his Snapchat.

First impressions of the interior: wood beams you could hang a swing from, a fireplace big enough to stand in, and that particular smell of old stone and woodsmoke that no candle has ever successfully replicated. The kitchen was reassuringly basic. No fancy coffee machine requiring an engineering degree, just a kettle, a hob, and enough pots to cook for a small army. I spotted a dishwasher and nearly wept. The margarine incident would not be repeated; there was actual butter in the village shop, which we found the next morning, run by a woman who spoke no English and tolerated my GCSE French with saintly patience.

The garden sloped down to nothing in particular, just fields and the distant suggestion of the Seine estuary. My daughter immediately claimed the hammock and refused to move for an hour. My son discovered the WiFi password and pronounced it "acceptable, actually," which is teenage for outstanding. I opened the cider, which was local and fizzy and tasted of apples that had known a proper autumn.

What struck me, sitting on the terrace that first evening, was how quickly the chaos of the journey dissolved. The wrong turning through a village with no name, the margarine shame, the lockbox wrestling match - all of it became funny rather than frustrating. That's the thing about these places, I think. They don't rush you. The cottage had been there long before package holidays existed, and it carried that sense of waiting patiently for people to catch up with its pace.

We cooked a simple dinner that night, pasta with the cheese I'd actually bought correctly, eaten at a wooden table that wobbled slightly until I folded a beer mat under one leg. The kids bickered about shower schedules. My wife opened wine. I watched the light fade over the fields and felt, for the first time in months, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be, margarine and all.