The sat nav had been cheerfully insisting we were "arriving at destination" for a good ten minutes before we actually found the turning, by which point I'd convinced myself we'd somehow driven to Spain. My partner Dave was doing that thing where he grips the steering wheel too tightly and hums tunelessly, which is never a good sign. We'd already had one spectacular row at a service station near Poitiers about whether we'd packed the travel cot, which we had, and whether Dave had remembered the wine, which he hadn't. So when we finally spotted the discreet little sign for La Tremblade, tucked down a sandy lane between pine trees, I felt something dangerously close to relief.

That relief lasted approximately forty seconds.

Dave, in his enthusiasm to park what he still calls "the battle bus" (it's a Vauxhall Zafira), managed to reverse straight into a rather imposing wooden post that I can only assume was put there specifically to catch overconfident British drivers. The crunch was extraordinary. Not the car, thank goodness, but the post wobbled like a drunk at closing time and toppled slowly, almost gracefully, into a lavender bush. Dave sat very still, hands still at ten and two, staring in the rear-view mirror. "Did you see that?" he whispered. "I think it saw me first."

We were still standing there, me holding the wobbly post and Dave making unconvincing noises about "structural integrity," when the property manager appeared from round the side of the house. She was wonderfully French about the whole thing, waving her hand dismissively and saying something that sounded like "c'est normale," though I suspect she was being kind. She showed us through to the terrace while Dave, mortified, insisted on propping the post back up with stones he found in a flowerbed.

And then I actually looked at where we were.

The house itself was simple and solid, the sort of place that doesn't try too hard because it doesn't need to. Whitewashed walls, terracotta roof tiles, shutters that actually shut properly. But it was the garden that stopped me mid-step. A proper enclosed garden, not one of those sad patches of gravel you sometimes get, but grass and flower beds and a terrace with a barbecue that looked like it had seen some action. Beyond the fence, pine trees stretched up like they were showing off, and somewhere in the distance I could smell salt on the air, that particular Atlantic coast smell that's somehow both sharp and calming.

The interior was cool after the car journey, tiled floors and wooden furniture that had the comfortable worn look of things actually used rather than staged for photographs. The kitchen was compact but properly equipped, not one of those holiday rentals where you open a drawer to find a single bent fork and a can opener from 1973. Dave had disappeared to "check the bedrooms," which I knew meant he was lying down to recover from the post incident.

I stepped back outside with a cup of tea, because some habits survive any journey, and stood on that terrace watching the late afternoon light filter through the pines. A gecko darted across the wall. Somewhere a dog barked, leisurely, unconcerned. The post Dave had felled still leaned slightly, a small monument to our arrival.

I thought about how we'd planned this trip during a grey February, how we'd imagined exactly this moment, and how reality always insists on being slightly more ridiculous than the imagining. The post would probably be fine. Dave would eventually emerge, hopefully with the wine situation resolved. We had a week of nothing much planned, which was rather the point.

The sat nav, I realised, had been right all along. We had arrived. Just not gracefully.