I should have known the holiday had truly begun when I managed to leave the sat nav on the kitchen table in Kent. There we were, three hours into the drive, halfway across Germany with nothing but my phone's dwindling battery and a crumpled printout that I'd confidently assured my wife I wouldn't need. "Technology's made us soft," I announced, as if this justified everything. She gave me that look. You know the one.

The Harz mountains crept up on us gradually, all misty forests and sudden glimpses of half-timbered houses clinging to hillsides like they'd been placed there by a particularly whimsical giant. By the time we wound down into Lautenthal, I'd apologised seven times and we'd eaten an entire packet of Haribo that was meant for the children. Parenting at its finest.

Finding the cottage should have been straightforward. It wasn't. Lautenthal's the sort of place where roads narrow to suggestions, and our hire car developed an alarming scrape against a stone wall that I definitely told everyone was already there. The cottage itself sat tucked along a quiet lane, traditional timber framing with a proper German solidity about it, flower boxes doing their cheerful best despite October's best efforts.

I fumbled with the key box code while my wife unloaded cases and the kids performed an impromptu talent show on the doorstep for the benefit of any watching neighbours. The door swung open to that particular hush of a place that's been waiting, patient, for occupants. Wooden floors, beams overhead thick as railway sleepers, that faint scent of pine and old stone that no air freshener has ever successfully replicated.

The children bolted upstairs to claim sleeping territories, which meant fifteen minutes of territorial negotiations while I stood in the kitchen proper, taking stock. Proper cooker, fridge that hummed contentedly, table that looked like it had hosted decades of card games and breakfast arguments. I opened the back door to a small garden, slightly overgrown in that acceptable German way, mountains visible beyond the rooftops when the mist permitted.

My wife appeared, bearing the crucial discovery: the heating worked, the hot water worked, and someone had left a bottle of local beer in the fridge. "Peace offering from the owners," she suggested. "Or previous guests who panicked at airport security." Either way, I claimed it as rightful tribute for my navigational suffering.

By evening, we'd established our pattern. The children had identified which floorboards creaked loudest and were treating this as scientific research. I'd burned the first round of sausages on the unfamiliar hob, producing something authentically charcoal that I rebranded as "traditional." We ate at that wooden table, curtains drawn against the dark, the mountain silence pressing in that comfortable way that town-dwellers forget exists.

Someone, I won't say who, had packed four phone chargers but no proper torch. Someone else, definitely me, had to make an embarrassing pilgrimage to the car by phone-light to retrieve the bag I'd sworn I'd brought in already. The stars overhead were ridiculous, proper countryside stars, the kind that make you feel briefly significant and properly tiny simultaneously.

We fell into bed early, travel-tired and full, the children's voices finally quiet from the room above. Lying there, listening to a silence broken only by occasional creaking timber and what I chose to believe was a distant owl, I thought about how we'd arrived. The wrong turns, the forgotten technology, the scraped car and the burnt dinner. The small failures that somehow, perversely, marked the start of something proper. We'd come for simple things, really. Walking, board games, that particular chaos of family contained in unfamiliar walls. Already, despite myself, it felt like the right sort of beginning.