I will never forget the moment I realised our hire car's boot was not, in fact, going to accommodate four suitcases, a buggy, three beach bags, and my mother-in-law's foldable sun lounger. We were somewhere on the E65 heading towards Nafpaktos, the Peloponnese shimmering across the Gulf of Corinth, and my husband was performing what can only be described as vehicular Tetris while our youngest practiced her operatic screaming in the back seat. The sun lounger stayed at a petrol station near Antirrio. I like to think someone very happy found it.

The crossing on the Rio-Antirrio bridge was meant to be the dramatic highlight of our journey, and it was, though mostly because I had accidentally opened a bag of crisps just as a gust of wind hit the car, sending salt and vinegar confetti swirling around the cabin. My husband gave me that look. You know the one. The one that says "I married you voluntarily" with a subtext of "please never change."

Skaloma itself announced its presence not with grandeur but with the sort of quiet charm that makes you exhale without realising. The village clings to the hillside above the Gulf, a tumble of terracotta roofs and cypress trees that looks exactly like the Greece you hope exists beyond the brochures. Our property sat at the end of a lane that grew progressively more optimistic about its own width, the final stretch requiring a three-point turn that my husband executed with the grim concentration of a man landing a plane. A cat watched from a wall. Judging, I felt.

The key was exactly where promised, which sounds unremarkable until you have spent two hours in a French farmhouse trying to locate a key that turned out to be inside a fake rock that looked, to all intents and purposes, like an actual rock. We tumbled through the door with the grace of a travelling circus, suitcases bouncing off doorframes, the buggy catching on a rug, someone shouting about needing the toilet with the urgency of a person who had been mentioning it for the previous forty minutes.

And then we stopped.

The living area opened onto a terrace that framed the Gulf like a painting someone had hung specifically for our arrival. The late afternoon light was doing that golden thing it does in Greece, turning everything slightly magical and forgiving. I could see Nafpaktos across the water, its castle visible even from here, a little thumbprint of history on the horizon. The children went suspiciously quiet, which in parenting terms means they have found something either wonderful or catastrophically dangerous. It was a lizard. They were delighted. The lizard, less so.

The kitchen had that satisfying solidity of somewhere actually lived in, not the sterile approximation of a kitchen you find in some holiday lets. I opened cupboards with the nosiness of a person who judges properties entirely on their utensil situation. Decent knives. A colander with actual holes. My husband caught me sniffing the olive oil and raised an eyebrow. "Research," I said, though we both knew it was pure holiday-induced nosiness.

By evening we had established our pattern without discussion. The children claimed the twin room with the enthusiasm of people who have never before encountered bunk beds. My mother-in-law installed herself in the ground-floor room with the dignity of a woman who has earned her en suite and intends to use it. We opened wine on the terrace as the lights began appearing across the Gulf, little pinpricks of other people's evenings beginning. Someone had forgotten to buy proper food, so we ate bread and tomatoes and cheese that tasted of actual sheep, which sounds like a complaint but absolutely is not.

The mishaps did not end, of course. They never do. But they became part of the rhythm rather than the disruption. The sun lounger was not missed. The lizard made regular appearances, growing bolder or perhaps simply more resigned. And somewhere between the wrong turn that led us to a tiny chapel with spectacular views, and the evening we tried to barbecue and created something between a meal and a controlled burn, I found that particular peace that comes from being somewhere that asks nothing of you but presence.

That first evening, though, remains the one I return to. The chaos of arrival giving way to stillness. The children finally asleep, the wine somehow tasting better than wine should, my husband and I sitting in a comfortable silence broken only by distant goat bells and my mother-in-law's surprisingly vigorous snoring from downstairs. The Gulf stretched before us, dark now, carrying ships and stories and the accumulated history of a place that has watched people arrive and depart for millennia.

We were just another family with too much luggage and not enough planning. But for that moment, on that terrace, with that view, it felt like exactly enough.