I have never been so pleased to see a gravel driveway in all my life. Six hours after leaving Lyon, three motorway services, two arguments about whose turn it was to choose the music, and one spectacular navigational cock-up that saw us circling the same roundabout near Arles four times, we finally crunched to a halt outside our holiday cottage in Saint-Martin-de-Crau. I stepped out of the car, stretched my legs, and immediately walked straight into a lavender bush. The smell was extraordinary. I smelt like a posh candle for the rest of the afternoon.

The mishap that had delayed us, though, was far more ridiculous. About twenty minutes from the property, I had suddenly remembered the supermarket shop. You know the one. The big arrival shop where you buy everything you think you need for a self-catering week, including seventeen types of cheese and enough wine to survive a small siege. I had done it online, click and collect, smug as you like. Except I had clicked the wrong branch. The wrong branch in entirely the wrong town. My wife looked at me with that particular expression she has, the one that says she loves me but is genuinely considering whether I should be allowed to operate heavy machinery. We had to backtrack, collect the bags from a confused teenager in a Carrefour car park, and start again. I pretended it was a scenic detour. Nobody believed me.

But standing there in the garden, lavender in my hair, watching the children already attempting to climb a tree that was definitely not designed for climbing, I felt the tension of the journey evaporate. The cottage had that lovely solid feel of somewhere built to withstand Provencal summers, thick walls and shutters that actually keep the heat out. A terrace with a table that would clearly become our headquarters for the week, scattered with bread crumbs and playing cards and the occasional escaping olive from someone's aperitif. The pool glinted in the corner of the garden, and I will admit I was sorely tempted to just fall straight in, clothes and all.

Inside, the place had that particular holiday rental smell of clean linen and someone else's furniture, which I rather like. It means you are somewhere else, properly elsewhere, with none of your own clutter to worry about. The kitchen was compact but workable, which is just as well given my self-imposed role as holiday chef. I say chef. I mean person who stands at a barbecue looking anxious while drinking rose. The children thundered upstairs to claim bedrooms, a process involving much running back and forth and one dramatic dispute over who had seen the room with the better view first. They are teenagers now, technically, but put them in a new house and they revert instantly to being about seven.

By late afternoon we had achieved that particular state of holiday arrival chaos. Bags half-unpacked in every room. A fridge full of those seventeen cheeses, already sweating slightly in the warmth. Someone had located the WiFi password, someone else had lost a flip-flop in the garden, and I had discovered that the local bread van comes past at eight in the morning, which information I treated with the reverence it deserved.

I sat on the terrace as the light began to soften, glass in hand, listening to the cicadas starting up their evening racket. The children were actually playing a board game together without apparent bloodshed. My wife was reading a book she had been meaning to finish for approximately three years. I thought about our ridiculous roundabout adventure, my supermarket incompetence, the lavender still probably in my hair, and I could not have cared less. This was exactly where we needed to be. The washing machine was already humming with someone's emergency swimwear load, a bottle of local wine was breathing on the counter, and tomorrow we had absolutely nothing planned except a slow breakfast and possibly a wander to see what the village actually looked like in daylight.

That is the particular magic of these places, I think. Not the grand gestures or the tick-list sightseeing, but the moment when the chaos of arrival finally settles, and you realise you have a whole week of very little stretched out ahead of you. I raised my glass to no one in particular, and decided that getting lost and buying cheese in the wrong town might just be the perfect way to start a holiday after all.