I had convinced myself that driving from Marseille airport to Saint-Remy-de-Provence would be the easy bit. Three weeks of poring over walking guides, plotting routes through the Alpilles hills, imagining myself striding across sun-baked ridges like some sort of Provencal adventurer. What I had not factored in was the rental car's sat-nav having a nervous breakdown somewhere near Cavaillon, nor my own spectacular inability to reverse out of a farm track while three elderly Frenchmen watched from a doorway, smoking in perfect synchronised silence. By the time I crunched up the gravel drive of our villa on the outskirts of Saint-Remy, my walking boots were still in the boot and my dignity was somewhere back on the D99.

The villa itself stopped me short. Not in a grand, intimidating way, but in that particular manner of Provencal farmhouses that seem to have grown organically from the ochre soil rather than been built. Thick stone walls the colour of honey on toast, shutters in that faded blue that makes British paint manufacturers weep with envy. A terrace with a table already commanding views of olive groves rolling towards the Alpilles. I stood there with my rucksack half-slung, suddenly aware that I smelled strongly of petrol station coffee and panic.

My partner emerged from inspecting the bedrooms wearing an expression I have learned to read over fifteen years. "There's a pool," she said, which in our shared language means "you are not dragging me up a mountain today, you lunatic." Fair enough. The late afternoon light was doing that extraordinary thing it does in Provence, turning everything golden and slightly unreal, as though the landscape were showing off specifically for newcomers.

We unpacked with the lazy inefficiency of people who have nowhere to be. I kept wandering to the windows, checking the sky like a farmer. The forecast had been ambiguous, that maddening European weather app vagueness that promises "possible precipitation" without committing to anything so vulgar as actual rain. British weather apps, for all their pessimism, at least have the courage of their convictions. This one merely shrugged in digital French.

Morning brought walking weather, or so I declared after my third coffee. The Mistral was blowing, that notorious wind that sweeps down the Rhone valley and apparently exists specifically to ruin the hair of British tourists. We set off towards the village proper, me in my serious walking boots and breathable layers, my partner in sensible shoes and the resigned expression of someone humouring a madman. The path wound through vineyards still stubbly from harvest, past stone walls held together by what looked like determination and dry lichen.

Saint-Remy revealed itself gradually. The old town's narrow streets, the fountain in the Place Favier where I stopped to adjust my rucksack and immediately looked like a lost German. We walked the Van Gogh trail, that marked route where he painted Starry Night during his stay at the asylum nearby. I found myself unexpectedly moved, standing before the reproduced easel at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole monastery, thinking about how he walked these same paths, saw these same cypress trees twisting in this same wind. The Mistral apparently drove him slightly mad, which I found comforting as it whipped my map from my hands and deposited it in an olive grove.

By afternoon the clouds had organised themselves into something more purposeful. We felt the first spots descending from the Alpilles, that particular mountain rain that arrives with theatrical timing just as you have committed to the longest route. We sheltered under a plane tree outside a cafe, watching the weather advance across the valley like a grey curtain being drawn. My carefully planned ridge walk dissolved into hot chocolate and a prolonged debate about whether "light showers" in French meteorological terms translates to "biblical deluge" in British experience.

The rain passed, as Mediterranean rain does, leaving everything smelling of thyme and wet stone. We walked back through damp vineyards as the light turned golden again, my boots making satisfying squelches, my partner's hair having achieved something magnificent in the humidity. That evening, on the villa terrace with rose and the last warmth of the day, I admitted that my rigid walking itinerary had been slightly ridiculous. The best moments had come unplanned: the unexpected shelter, the post-rain light, the conversation with a local who directed us to a path not in any of my guidebooks.

I still checked the forecast obsessively for the fortnight. Old habits, British anxieties about weather that no amount of Provencal sunshine can quite cure. But I learned to walk more loosely, to let the Mistral and the occasional downpour shape the days rather than fight them. The Alpilles would still be there tomorrow, and the day after, patient in their limestone silence. Some lessons, it turns out, require both proper walking boots and the humility to abandon them occasionally for a terrace and a glass of something cold.