I have never been so relieved to see a hot tub in my life, and that includes the time I accidentally walked into a spa reception thinking it was a dentist's waiting room. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to the beginning of our family trip to Champoluc, because the journey there is really where the whole story lives.

We set off from Turin airport full of that particular optimism that only a family of four can muster after a 6am flight. The hire car was slightly too small, the snacks were already being fought over, and I had appointed myself navigator despite having the spatial awareness of a distracted goldfish. My partner drove while I confidently directed us toward what I believed was the Aosta Valley. Reader, it was not the Aosta Valley. We spent forty-five minutes winding through villages that grew increasingly confused by our presence, until a lovely old man in a petrol station pointed out that I had been holding the map upside down. Not the whole time, I hasten to add. Just the crucial bit.

By the time we found the right road, the mountains had appeared like a reward we had not earned. The Aosta Valley does that to you. One moment you are bickering about whose fault the detour was, the next you are driving through a landscape so absurdly beautiful you forget to finish your sentence. The villages clung to hillsides in that casual Italian way, all stone and shutters and the promise of excellent coffee.

Champoluc itself announced itself with a bridge, a bend, and then suddenly we were there. Our holiday property sat on the edge of the village, close enough to walk to the bakery in the morning but far enough that the only evening noise was a cowbell somewhere in the middle distance. I had worried it would feel too isolated, too removed from the bustle we associate with Italian holidays. I need not have bothered. What it felt like, immediately, was exhale. The kind of place where you remember that holidays are meant to be restful, not a competitive sport of sightseeing.

The first thing we did was misjudge the heating. The property had underfloor warming, which in my exhausted state I cranked to what I believed was a sensible twenty-two degrees. It was not twenty-two degrees. It was, by morning, a temperature suitable for slow-roasting a shoulder of lamb. We woke at 3am convinced we had contracted some tropical fever, only to discover the thermostat laughing at us from the hallway. The children thought this was the height of comedy. I opened every window and stood in my pyjamas on the balcony, letting minus-whatever-it-was alpine air wash over me while the mountains sat there in the moonlight, completely unbothered.

That balcony became my spot. Each morning I would take my coffee out there and watch the village wake up. The bakery sent smells up the hill that felt almost aggressive in their deliciousness. Small tractors puttered about with the unhurried confidence of vehicles that have never seen a traffic jam. Somewhere a dog barked at a cloud. It was all gloriously, defiantly slow.

The property itself had that particular charm of somewhere built for actual living rather than photographic perfection. The kitchen had a table that wobbled slightly, the kind you prop with a folded beer mat and pretend is intentional. The sofas had the deep, accepting slump of furniture that has hosted decades of post-ski naps. There were board games with pieces missing, which we discovered when my youngest attempted to cheat at Monopoly using a button she found in her pocket. The hot tub, when we eventually worked out the controls without flooding the terrace, became our evening ritual. There is something wonderfully ridiculous about sitting in bubbling warm water while snow sits on the mountains above you and your children argue about who gets to be the jet button monitor.

What struck me most, that first day and the days after, was how quickly we stopped trying to do things. No frantic itinerary, no must-see checklist. We walked to the village for bread and cheese, came back and ate it slowly. We built a fire that smoked slightly because I have never learned to build a fire properly and probably never will. We played cards badly and laughed at our own incompetence. The children, usually so screen-hungry, discovered the garden had a slope perfect for rolling down until they were dizzy and grass-stained.

I think there is a particular lesson in that first day of chaos and wrong turns and overheating. We arrived flustered and slightly defeated by our own incompetence, and the place just absorbed it. The mountains did not care about my map skills. The village did not judge my thermostat management. There was time to get things wrong, to adjust, to settle into a rhythm that matched the place rather than forcing our usual frantic pace upon it.

By the second evening, sitting in that hot tub with a drink that had perhaps more local liqueur in it than was strictly sensible, I felt something I had not expected. Not just relaxation, though there was that. Something closer to recognition. This was what we needed, all of us. Not another holiday spent racing between experiences, but this slower thing. This permission to be slightly rubbish at things and enjoy them anyway.

We stayed a week. I never did master the fire, and the map remained a theoretical interest rather than a practical skill. But I learned the way to the bakery without thinking, and the names of two of the village dogs, and the particular quality of light in the early morning when the mountains turn pink and ridiculous. That is what I brought home, along with the slight smell of woodsmoke that lingered in my jumper for days afterwards. Some holidays you remember for what you did. This one I will remember for what I stopped trying to do.