I have never been so relieved to see a stone wall in my life. After seven hours of driving from Calais, two wrong turns around Turin, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted Cogne was "straight ahead" through what was clearly a farmer's field, we finally crawled up the Valnontey road as the afternoon sun dipped behind the Gran Paradiso massif. My partner Dave was gripping the steering wheel like he might throttle it. I was clutching a bag of slightly melted Haribo and the remains of my dignity.

The mishap, though. I should start there, because it rather set the tone.

We had stopped in Aosta for supplies, feeling terribly organised. Cheese, obviously. Some local Fontina that smelled like proper socks. Bread. Wine. A optimistic bag of salad that would later weep quietly in the fridge. I had packed everything carefully in the boot, except I hadn't. The wine bottle, which I had wedged behind my rucksack with the confidence of a fool, had worked itself loose somewhere between Aosta and Cogne. We discovered this when Dave opened the boot in the property's gravel driveway and a thin stream of red liquid trickled out like a crime scene. The bottle had survived, somehow. The lid of the olive oil next to it had not. Everything smelled of a poorly conceived salad dressing. My walking boots may never recover.

The house itself stopped us both short. Not grand, exactly, but solid and handsome in that way Alpine stone houses have, as if they have simply refused to fall down for three hundred years out of stubbornness. Wooden balconies stacked above each other, geraniums in boxes, and beyond it the valley narrowing towards glaciers we could not yet see but somehow knew were there. The air hit us immediately, that thin, sharp mountain cold that makes your lungs feel slightly alarmed. Dave took a deep breath and promptly coughed. "Healthy," he wheezed.

The key was in a lockbox, which took ten minutes and some creative language to open. I blame altitude. We are not mountain people, generally. We are from Norfolk, where the highest point is a slight rise in a beet field. Here, everything felt vertical. The mountains pressed in, enormous and patient, and I found myself speaking more quietly without meaning to.

Inside, the house smelled of wood polish and something else, something I later realised was simply clean mountain air trapped in old stone. The stairs creaked. The radiators clanked with the enthusiasm of elderly plumbing. Dave immediately turned on every light switch to see what would happen, which is simply what he does in new places, like a toddler. A lamp in the upstairs bedroom. The outside light. Something in the cellar that may have been a water pump and may have been a ghost.

I stood in the kitchen, surrounded by our oil-soaked provisions, and felt something shift. The chaos of the journey, the wine disaster, my ruined boots, the sat nav still probably telling some other poor soul to drive through a meadow, it all seemed suddenly very small. The window above the sink framed a view of larch trees and rock face that made me feel slightly fraudulent, as if I had accidentally wandered into a postcard and someone would shortly ask me to leave.

Dave appeared with two mismatched glasses and the one surviving bottle that had not committed suicide in the boot. "Cheers," he said. "To not driving tomorrow."

We drank on the little balcony as the last light left the valley, cold enough to need jumpers, watching nothing in particular happen very beautifully indeed. The mountains did not care about our journey. They simply sat there, immense and indifferent, and I found that rather comforting.