I have never been so relieved to see a swimming pool in my entire life, and that includes the time our youngest fell into the ornamental pond at my aunt's wedding.

The journey from Stansted had been one of those classic family holidays where everything goes slightly wrong in ways that will, I am told, be hilarious in approximately five years. We had decided to drive from Nice airport because I had confidently declared it would be "more scenic" and "give us flexibility." What I had failed to account for was my husband's inability to operate a French toll booth, three separate loo emergencies from the back seat, and the sat nav deciding that a dirt track through a vineyard constituted a legitimate route.

The mishap came just outside Vidauban itself. I was navigating, which should have been my first warning sign. "Turn left at the next junction," I announced with the authority of someone who had spent six years studying French and could confidently order a croissant. The junction in question turned out to be a farm entrance. A very solid farm entrance. There was a crunch that made my teeth hurt, followed by a silence from the driver's seat that spoke volumes. We had detached the front bumper. Not completely, you understand. Just enough to make the car look like it was trying to eat itself.

By the time we limped up to the stone farmhouse, I had mentally composed the insurance claim and approximately four different apologies. But then the owner appeared, took one look at our battered Renault and our even more battered expressions, and simply laughed. "The road," she said, gesturing vaguely, "she is not kind." This struck me as the most perfectly French response imaginable.

The property itself was exactly the sort of place that makes you forget your bumper-related woes. A proper old mas with thick stone walls and shutters that actually shut, surrounded by those flat fields of vines and the distant blue haze of hills that make Provence look like someone has applied an Instagram filter to reality. The pool sat at the far end of the garden, shimmering with that particular turquoise you only seem to get in France, and I will confess that within twenty minutes of arrival I was in it, fully clothed from the waist down, because I could not be bothered to find my costume and frankly nobody was looking.

The children had already vanished into the house, discovering the sort of minor chaos that delights them: a slightly sticky kitchen table, a bathroom with a shower attachment that required the sort of wrist action I had not anticipated, bedrooms with doors that stuck in the humidity. They pronounced it "brilliant" within approximately four minutes, which is three minutes longer than their usual threshold for holiday accommodation approval.

That first evening, we walked the ten minutes into Vidauban proper, still slightly damp and definitely underdressed for anywhere civilised. The village is not one of those Provencal places that appears in glossy magazines, all lavender fields and artisanal soap. It is simply a working town with a decent boulangerie, a tabac where old men play cards with the intensity of professional athletes, and a small square where we ate pizza that cost approximately half what it would at home and tasted approximately twice as good.

I sat there with wine that came in a carafe, watching my children chase each other round a plane tree, my husband nursing a beer and periodically touching the front of the car as if checking for a fever. The bumper situation remained unresolved. The house awaited our return, with its slightly eccentric plumbing and its pool that I already knew would dominate our entire stay. I felt something shift, some knot of motorway stress and airport anxiety and general modern life tension, beginning to loosen.

We had arrived. We had, in our small and ridiculous way, survived. And somewhere in the warm darkness, the cicadas were already tuning up for another performance.