The SatNav gave up on us somewhere between Angouleme and La Rochelle, which should have been my first clue that this holiday was going to be character-building. We'd been driving since the crack of dawn, the kids were doing that thing where they alternate between complete silence and screaming about whose turn it was on the tablet, and my other half was gripping the steering wheel like he was auditioning for a rally film. Then I spotted a sign for Saint Pierre la Noue and got overexcited, insisting we turn down what I can only describe as a glorified tractor path.

Reader, it was not the right Saint Pierre la Noue.

Twenty minutes of increasingly tense navigation later, we found ourselves in someone's farmyard being stared at by three enormous Limousin cows and a very unimpressed farmer. My GCSE French deserted me completely. I panicked and said "pardon" approximately eleven times in thirty seconds, which the farmer seemed to accept as a reasonable apology for trespassing. He pointed us back toward the proper road with the resigned expression of a man who has redirected many lost British families in his time.

When we finally pulled up to the actual holiday home, I nearly wept with relief. There it was, a proper stone cottage with that lovely honey-coloured rendering you get in this part of France, shutters painted a soft green, and a garden that looked like someone actually cared about it. The key was in the lockbox exactly where the instructions said, which felt like a minor miracle given our track record that day.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. Not the damp, slightly disappointed smell of British self-catering places I've known, but something warm and faintly herby. Dried lavender somewhere, maybe, and that particular sun-baked stone scent that makes you immediately want to slow down. The kids barrelled past me to claim bedrooms, and I stood in the hallway with my suitcase still in hand, finally allowing myself to believe we'd actually made it.

The kitchen was one of those gloriously impractical French country affairs, all terracotta tiles and a proper range cooker that looked like it had been feeding families since before the war. I opened the back door and found the terrace, shaded by some ancient vine, with a table that could easily seat eight. Beyond that, the garden sloped down to a fence, and beyond that, nothing but fields and the distant shimmer of what I later learned was a small drainage canal. It was so quiet I could hear a cockerel from what sounded like three villages away.

My other half emerged from inspecting the barbecue with the satisfied expression of a man who has found his purpose. "There's a proper charcoal one," he announced, as if this justified the entire holiday expenditure. The children had already discovered the swimming pool, which was tucked round the side with one of those solar covers that you have to wrestle off like a giant blue snake. Their shrieks echoed off the stone walls in a way that would have annoyed me at home but somehow felt right here.

I poured myself a glass of the local white we'd picked up at a supermarket in panic, before the SatNav incident. It was too warm, slightly too sweet, and absolutely perfect. Sitting on that terrace, watching my husband attempt to decipher the pool filter instructions with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb, I felt something shift. The wrong turn, the cow encounter, the eleven pandons, they all seemed worth it for this particular moment of slightly chaotic peace.

The kids emerged dripping and demanding food. The shops were shut because of course we'd arrived on a Sunday afternoon when rural France closes its doors and pretends the outside world doesn't exist. We cobbled together a strange supper from motorway snacks and the emergency pasta I'd packed, eaten at that enormous table as the light turned golden and the cockerel finally gave up for the evening.

It wasn't the elegant arrival I'd imagined. But sitting there, slightly sunburned from the drive, drinking warm wine with people I love, I thought maybe the best holidays aren't the ones that go to plan. Maybe they're the ones where you get lost, apologise to livestock, and still end up somewhere that feels like it might, for a week at least, be exactly where you're supposed to be.