I have never been so relieved to see a cow as I was when we finally found our holiday cottage in Untergriesbach. Three hours of driving from Munich, two wrong turns, one argument about whether I had actually downloaded the offline map, and there she was, chewing grass beside a sign that basically said "yes, this is somewhere."

The mishap, because there always is one, came about twenty minutes from our destination. I had stopped at a petrol station for the obligatory German chocolate and a loo break, and in my wisdom decided to let our youngest, Milo, hold the cottage keys. You can see where this is going. Somewhere between the car park and the A8, the keys vanished into what I can only describe as a black hole of child logic. "I put them somewhere safe," he announced, with the proud grin of someone who genuinely believes this helps. They were in his welly. His welly, which he had taken off in the back seat because his feet were "too footy." We found them after ten minutes of increasingly frantic searching, just as a very patient Bavarian man in lederhosen waited to use the pump behind us. I waved apologetically. He did not wave back.

But then we arrived, and honestly, the relief was physical. Untergriesbach sits in the Lower Bavarian hills like someone left it there on purpose and forgot to tell anyone. Our cottage, a solid wooden farmhouse with flower boxes that looked almost aggressively picturesque, had a garden that sloped down towards nothing in particular except fields and more fields. The air smelled of cut grass and something faintly agricultural that I chose to interpret as "authentic."

The first thing I noticed was the quiet. Not peaceful quiet, but the slightly unnerving quiet of someone who lives in Manchester and has forgotten what absence of sound feels like. Even the birds seemed to be doing it deliberately. "Is this normal?" my wife asked, standing in the doorway with a teatowel we had not yet assigned a purpose to. I said yes, confidently, having no idea.

Inside, the cottage had that particular holiday rental energy where everything is slightly too nice to actually use. The sofa was wooden-framed and firm in that German way, the kind of furniture that suggests sitting is a privilege to be earned. The kitchen had actual ceramic plates with actual patterns, not the chipped supermarket survivors we use at home. Milo immediately dropped one. It survived. German engineering, I muttered, though I have no idea if that applies to crockery.

By evening, the mishap energy had faded into something else. We sat on the terrace with beers from the local brewery, watching the light change over the hills in that slow, theatrical way it does when you have absolutely nothing scheduled. Milo was attempting to befriend a ladybird. My wife was reading a book she had brought specifically and was actually reading, not just carrying around for show. I was mainly concentrating on doing nothing successfully, which turns out to require more practice than you would think.

The ladybird escaped. Milo cried briefly, then found a stick. The stick became a wand, then a sword, then something to poke the flower beds with until I suggested otherwise. This is cottage life, I suppose. The chaos does not stop, it just relocates to somewhere with better scenery.

I went to bed that night slightly sunburnt, slightly beer-happy, and genuinely uncertain what day of the week it was. Somewhere outside, a cow made a noise that sounded almost like laughter. I chose not to take it personally.