I have never been so pleased to see a row of pastel-coloured beach huts in my entire life. Twelve hours after leaving Derby, three wrong turns around Bologna, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted "Lido Di Pomposa" was somewhere in the middle of a sunflower field, we finally crawled onto the Emilia Romagna coast. My husband Mark had sworn blind he did not need my phone's directions. Mark was, it turned out, quite wrong. The children had progressed from "Are we nearly there?" to a profound silence that felt more threatening than any tantrum. I had eaten an entire packet of mints out of stress. The holiday had not technically begun, and I already needed a lie down.

The cottage complex sat behind a low hedge of tamarisk, those wispy trees that somehow survive the salt and the heat. Our place was one of a little cluster, all terracotta roofs and cream render, with a small patio that looked onto a shared garden. The key was in a lockbox, which Mark attacked with the enthusiasm of a man who had something to prove after the navigation debacle. It took him four attempts. I said nothing. This was my gift to him.

Inside smelled of clean linen and faintly of the sea, that particular Adriatic smell that is part brine, part pine from the nearby pineta. The kitchen was compact but properly equipped, not one of those holiday setups where you get a blunt knife and a saucepan with no handle. The children bolted through to the back, discovered the shared pool, and began a negotiation about swimming before unpacking that would have impressed United Nations mediators. I opened the bedroom shutters. There was the garden, there was a clothes line already strung between two posts, there was a woman two doors down hanging out towels with the practised efficiency of someone who had been doing this for forty summers. She nodded. I nodded back. We understood each other perfectly.

The mishap, because there is always one with us, came within the hour. Mark had unpacked the car while I supervised the children, which meant he had dumped everything in the main bedroom and disappeared to test the pool temperature. I went to make tea. The kettle was straightforward. The hob, however, was gas, and the ignition clicker was not cooperating. I fiddled, I clicked, I grew overconfident. There was a small whoomph, a larger eyebrow singe, and the realisation that I had never quite mastered the Italian gas hob. Mark returned to find me flapping a tea towel at the smoke alarm and explaining that no, the children did not need evacuating, and yes, I was perfectly fine despite the unmistakable smell of burnt hair. He made the tea after that. Some things are best left to those with eyebrows intact.

By evening we had walked the ten minutes to the beach, the children already sandy-kneed and triumphant. The shoreline here is that classic Adriatic stretch, wide and gradual, the sort of beach where you walk out fifty metres and the water still barely reaches your waist. Families were staking out their patches with the elaborate territoriality of seasoned regulars. We paddled, we watched a nonna in a floral cap direct her grandchildren with military precision, we ate gelato from a nearby kiosk that the woman two doors down had recommended with another meaningful nod.

Back at the cottage, the children fell asleep with the exhausted abandon of those who have been properly outside all day. Mark and I sat on the patio with the local wine we had picked up, listening to the distant sound of the pineta's cicadas and the not-so-distant sound of someone else's barbecue. I thought about the eyebrow, the sat nav, the twelve hours. I thought about how holidays with small children are rarely restful in the way you imagine, but how this particular tiredness felt earned rather than endured. The clothes line swayed slightly in the evening breeze. Tomorrow we would do very little, and do it slowly, and that was precisely the point.

The woman two doors down was still out there, watering her geraniums in the half-light. She caught my eye and raised her glass. I raised mine back. We were all in this together, whatever this was, and for a week at least, it was absolutely enough.