I'd been promising myself a proper escape to the mountains for ages, so when I finally booked a week at a place called Feltre in the Dolomites, I was already mentally packing my walking boots before I'd even clicked confirm. The journey from the UK was always going to be a bit of an expedition, fly to Venice, pick up a hire car, then drive north for what the internet casually described as "about two hours." Reader, it was not two hours.

The approach through the Veneto countryside is gorgeous enough, vineyards and little towns with campaniles poking above the rooftops, but once you start climbing proper mountain roads, everything changes. The air gets thinner, the temperature drops, and suddenly you're winding through passes with limestone cliffs rising on either side like someone's built a film set. I was giddy with it, craning my neck at every turn, which is probably why I missed the turning for Feltre itself and ended up in some village fifteen minutes up the wrong valley. Classic me. The sat nav had apparently given up in protest, and my phone signal had vanished somewhere around the last petrol station. I had to reverse down a narrow lane to let a tractor pass, while the driver watched with the amused patience of someone who's seen this exact scene a hundred times before.

When I finally found the right road and pulled up outside the property, I just sat in the car for a moment, partly from relief and partly because the view had rather stolen my breath. The house sits in that perfect Dolomite spot where you're surrounded by peaks but not so high up that you feel isolated from civilisation. There's a proper garden with what looked like fruit trees, and beyond that the mountains just stack up in layers, grey and green and then suddenly that pale limestone catching the afternoon light. I grew up in the Peak District, which I still maintain is lovely in its own modest way, but this was something else entirely. I felt a bit like a child who's wandered into a cathedral for the first time, slightly overwhelmed and not quite sure where to look.

The key collection was straightforward enough, though I made a complete hash of the lockbox and spent an embarrassing amount of time jiggling a code that I'd written down wrong. A neighbour eventually appeared on their balcony and called down helpful instructions in Italian that I mostly understood through gestures and goodwill rather than actual vocabulary. I waved my thanks with the desperate enthusiasm of someone who knows they've been caught looking incompetent in a foreign country.

Stepping inside for the first time, the smell hit me immediately, that particular mountain-house scent of wood and old stone and something faintly herby. The rooms were bigger than I'd expected from the photos, with beamed ceilings and floors that creaked in all the right places. I dumped my bags with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who's been travelling for the best part of a day and immediately opened every window to let that extraordinary air in. It carried the sound of a stream somewhere nearby, and birdsong, and absolutely nothing else. No traffic hum, no distant aeroplanes, just the mountains doing their ancient, indifferent thing.

I made myself a cup of tea with the supplies I'd grabbed at a supermarket in Belluno, stood on the terrace with my hands wrapped around the mug, and felt something in my shoulders finally unclench. The mishaps of the journey, the wrong turn, the lockbox fiasco, they all seemed faintly ridiculous now, little comic interludes in a story that was clearly going to be worth the telling. The late afternoon sun was sliding behind the peaks, turning them that extraordinary pink-orange colour the Dolomites are famous for, and I remember thinking that I'd done absolutely nothing of note since arriving, yet already felt completely, stupidly happy about the whole enterprise.