The sat nav had been insisting for the best part of an hour that we were nearly there, which I have come to realise is French for "prepare to question every life choice that led you to this mountain road." My wife was navigating, the kids were arguing about who had more room for their feet, and I was gripping the steering wheel with the white-knuckled enthusiasm of a man who had not fully appreciated what "scenic route" actually entailed. Then came the mishap. In my eagerness to spot the turning for Veyrier-du-Lac, I managed to reverse our hire car into a very solid, very unimpressed stone wall. The crunch was spectacular. The silence that followed was worse. My daughter, aged nine and blessed with a sense of timing that will serve her well in comedy, simply said, "Dad's done a bad park." We had not even arrived yet.

The property itself, when we finally found it tucked among the trees above Lake Annecy, was one of those classic Rhone-Alpes timber and stone affairs that looks like it belongs on a postcard. I was still sweating from the wall incident and attempting to look casual about the dent in the bumper. My wife was not speaking to me, though she was communicating quite effectively through raised eyebrows and pointed glances. The key was in a lockbox, which of course required a code I had written down on my phone, which of course had no signal. Ten minutes of holding the device aloft like some pagan offering to the gods of 4G eventually yielded enough bars to retrieve the digits. The door swung open and the smell hit us immediately - that particular blend of old wood, mountain air, and the faint ghost of someone else's cooking that makes a holiday cottage feel properly lived-in rather than merely let out.

The children bolted upstairs to claim beds, which in our family is less a casual selection and more a competitive sport with rules nobody has agreed upon. I stayed in the kitchen, unpacking the shopping we had panic-bought at a Super U in Annecy. The cheese selection alone suggested I had lost my mind in the dairy aisle, overwhelmed by choice and the pressure of being in France. There was enough comte to feed a small village. My wife appeared, still maintaining dignified silence, and began opening shutters to reveal a balcony that looked directly down through pine trees to the lake below. The water was that impossible turquoise you see in photographs and assume must be edited. It was not edited. I said something profound like "blimey" and she almost smiled.

By late afternoon the wall incident had been downgraded from catastrophe to anecdote, largely through the strategic application of local wine and the realisation that nobody in France was going to inspect our bumper with forensic zeal. We ate bread and cheese on that balcony, wrapped in jumpers against the mountain chill that arrives without invitation even in decent weather. The kids were already filthy from exploring the garden, which sloped away into undergrowth they found deeply mysterious. I watched them disappear behind a shed and reappear triumphant with a football that had clearly been left by previous tenants, now their greatest treasure.

That first evening, I found myself standing at the kitchen window washing up with water that took an age to run hot, watching the last light catch the lake through the trees. The sat nav sat dark and silent on the counter, its lies temporarily forgiven. My wife came and stood beside me, drying a plate with the inefficient thoroughness of someone who has not quite decided whether to resume normal conversation. "Tomorrow," she said, "we walk to the lake. No car." I agreed with the enthusiasm of a man who had learned his lesson about French roads and stone walls. She handed me another plate to wash. The silence was properly broken now, replaced by the comfortable rhythm of shared domesticity in an unfamiliar kitchen. Outside, a bird I could not identify made a noise like a rusty hinge. The children were arguing again upstairs, something about whose turn it was with the mysterious football. I had cheese in my beard and no intention of removing it yet. This, I thought, is what we came for.