We had been on the road since dawn, winding through Brittany with a boot full of walking boots, waterproofs, and what my partner optimistically called "provisions" but was mostly wine and cheese from a supermarket just outside Rennes. The satnav had given up somewhere around Niort, leaving us to navigate by instinct and a crumpled printout that I now suspect was for an entirely different property. By the time we spotted the turning for Romegoux, I was already composing the complaint email in my head.

The mishap came at the final gate. I had insisted on opening it myself, leaping out with the sort of enthusiasm that only eight hours in a car can produce. The gate swung back with unexpected force, catching my elbow and sending my phone arcing through the air like a particularly expensive clay pigeon. It landed face-down in a puddle that had clearly been waiting for exactly this moment. I retrieved it silently, wiped it on my jumper, and discovered that the screen now displayed everything in an interesting shade of vertical stripe. My partner, wisely, said nothing at all.

The property itself stopped any further self-pity in its tracks. A traditional stone longere with that particular honeyed colour you only seem to find in Poitou-Charentes, it sat among meadows that rolled away towards woods on one side and open farmland on the other. The owners had left the key under a terracotta pot, alongside a handwritten note warning us about a neighbour's particularly vocal donkey. I remember thinking that this was already more eventful than our last holiday in the Lake District, where the most dramatic wildlife encounter had been a mildly aggressive swan.

We dumped our bags and did what every British holidaymaker does after a long journey: made tea using supplies we had brought from home, because apparently we believed France had not yet discovered teabags. Then we consulted the weather app on my damaged phone, which showed nothing but sunshine for the week ahead. My partner raised an eyebrow. We have been together long enough to know what that meant.

The next morning proved her right. I woke to the sound of rain that can only be described as committed. Not the half-hearted drizzle of home, but a proper downpour with genuine ambition. We drank our imported tea and watched the meadow transform into something approaching a wetland reserve. The walking route I had planned, a gentle loop through nearby woodland to a village bakery, suddenly seemed less appealing.

By midday the rain had eased to what my grandmother would have called "spitting," and we set out anyway, armed with waterproofs and a stubbornness that I prefer to call character. The path started promisingly, cutting between hedgerows loud with birds we could not identify. Within twenty minutes the skies opened again, properly this time, and we sheltered under an oak tree that offered approximately the same protection as a wire colander. We laughed, eventually, though I suspect my partner's mirth had a slightly hysterical edge.

The rest of the week continued in this vein. We became amateur meteorologists, studying cloud formations with the intensity of people whose entire holiday depended on them. We developed a system: heavy grey meant a circuit of the immediate lanes, staying within sprinting distance of the gite; broken cloud suggested a longer loop through the nearby forest; actual sunshine, which appeared twice for roughly forty-five minutes each time, prompted frantic longer walks to a nearby viewpoint that we never quite reached before the rain returned.

On our third attempt at that viewpoint, we made it to a clearing where an abandoned stone barn sat among brambles. The sun emerged, improbably, and we ate our squashed sandwiches with the particular gratitude of people who have earned them through suffering. A kestrel hovered overhead. My phone, still striped but functional, captured a photo that looks almost deliberately artistic. I keep it as my screensaver, partly for the memory and partly as a reminder that the best moments often follow the worst weather.

We did eventually reach that bakery, on our final morning, when the skies finally cleared with what felt like reluctant apology. The croissants were still warm. I ate mine on a bench outside, watching the same meadows that had been so thoroughly drowned now glowing in proper sunlight. My phone died completely that afternoon, which felt fitting somehow. Some holidays are better recorded in damp walking boots and the particular ache of muscles that have earned their rest.