I have never been so pleased to see a pine tree in all my life. Twelve hours after leaving Derby, three motorways, one deeply overpriced tunnel, and a sat-nav that developed what I can only describe as an existential crisis somewhere near Modena, we finally turned onto the Via Romea and there they were: rows of maritime pines, tall and thin and improbably elegant, like nature's own lamp posts guiding us the last few miles to Lido di Pomposa.

The mishap, because there always is one, happened at Bologna services. I had insisted on buying proper coffee, none of your motorway nonsense, and in my caffeine-deprived state managed to walk straight into a glass door that I absolutely thought was open. The coffee went everywhere. My dignity went everywhere. A very kind nonna mopped my shoulder with a napkin and said something I choose to believe was sympathetic. My partner, naturally, filmed the whole thing. We did not speak for twenty minutes, which in a Fiat 500 is quite the achievement.

But back to the pines. By the time we reached the property, I had developed what felt like a deeply personal relationship with them. You know that feeling when a journey has been just slightly too long, when your knees have forgotten what straightening feels like and your brain has started interpreting every road sign as a personal slight? The pines were my signal that the car could stop, that I could stop, that the holiday could finally begin.

The property itself sits in that classic Emilia Romagna arrangement: low-rise, terracotta-roofed, arranged around communal gardens that someone clearly takes enormous pride in. Our place was on the ground floor, which I mention only because my post-journey legs would not have managed stairs without complaint. The key was exactly where promised, in a little lockbox that made me feel like a very slow, very tired secret agent.

Opening the door, the first thing that hit me was the smell. Not the musty, closed-up scent I had braced for, but something cleaner, pine-adjacent, with a hint of the sea that I later realised drifts through most afternoons when the wind turns. The second thing was the tiles. Cool underfoot, slightly worn in that way that suggests decades of sandy feet rather than neglect, patterned in geometric designs that my mother would have called "authentically Mediterranean" and I would have agreed with just to keep the peace.

I made straight for the terrace, coffee disaster forgotten. There it was: not a sea view exactly, but a garden view that promised the sea was near, with those same pines filtering the afternoon light into something almost drinkable. My partner appeared with two bottles of San Pellegrino from the fridge, which we had not bought and which therefore counted as a gift from the holiday gods. We sat on plastic chairs that creaked reassuringly and did not speak, properly this time, for what felt like half an hour but was probably seven minutes.

What struck me then, and what I keep returning to now, is how completely I had forgotten what arrival feels like. Not the Instagram version, all cocktails and golden hour, but the real thing: the slight disorientation of unfamiliar light switches, the discovery that the shower runs hot only if you coax it, the tentative opening of cupboards to find previous guests' abandoned olive oil and a deck of cards with three missing. The gentle, necessary process of realising you are somewhere else now, and that somewhere else is slowly becoming yours.

By evening, we had found the beach path, a sandy cutting between two properties that emerges so suddenly onto the Adriatic that I actually laughed out loud. The sea was doing that flat, silvery thing it does here, the horizon line barely distinguishable from sky. Children were still out, Italian children who apparently do not observe British bedtime conventions, chasing each other through shallows that must have been getting chilly.

We ate at a beachfront place, nothing fancy, plastic tablecloths and a waiter who addressed me as "capo" in what I suspect was gentle mockery of my attempts at Italian. The piadina arrived warm and slightly charred, filled with squacquerone cheese that I later learned is absolutely the local thing to order, so my random pointing had accidentally been correct. We drank house white that tasted of absolutely nothing and therefore of everything, of holidays specifically, of the particular nothing that allows your thoughts to finally slow down.

Walking back in darkness, the pines now just shapes against stars I did not recognise, I thought about that glass door in Bologna. The ridiculousness of it. The way my partner's shoulders had shaken with suppressed laughter. The nonna's patient mopping. It already felt like the necessary price of admission, the small humiliation that earns you the right to arrive somewhere properly, stripped of dignity and therefore open to whatever comes next.

The cicadas were going, that relentless Mediterranean sound that seems aggressive until it becomes background, then essential. Somewhere nearby, a television played an Italian talent show at improbable volume. Our terrace waited, plastic chairs and borrowed water and all, and I found myself actually looking forward to tomorrow's discoveries: the morning light through those pines, the first proper swim, the inevitable wrong turn that would lead somewhere unexpected.

But that was tomorrow. For now, arrival was enough.