I have never been brilliant with directions, and my first visit to Lignano Pineta proved it in spectacular fashion. There we were, two hours after landing at Trieste, circling the same roundabout for the third time while my partner clutched the phone and I pretended to know exactly where I was going. The sat nav had given up on us entirely. In the back, our youngest announced she needed the loo with the kind of urgency only a six-year-old can muster. The temperature gauge in the hire car read thirty-two degrees. I kept smiling, of course. That fixed, desperate smile of a man who has made a terrible error but refuses to admit it.

We found the place eventually, tucked down a quiet lane where pine trees cast proper shade and the air smelled of resin and somewhere, faintly, of the sea. I had booked a cottage-style property through Novasol, nothing flashy, just somewhere with a bit of garden and enough beds that nobody had to share with a wriggling child. The key was in the lockbox as promised. I fumbled the code twice, convinced I had been sent the wrong one, before the thing clicked open and I felt that particular relief of a traveller who has not, after all, been completely abandoned in a foreign country.

Stepping inside was like letting out a breath I had not realised I was holding. Cool tiles underfoot. Wooden shutters half-closed against the afternoon glare. A kitchen that looked like someone actually cooked in it rather than just photographed it for a brochure. I opened the back door and there was the garden, modest but green, with a terrace where a plastic table and chairs sat waiting for someone to do absolutely nothing much at all. Our eldest immediately claimed a bedroom with bunk beds. The youngest discovered the outdoor shower and decided this was the greatest invention in human history. I discovered the fridge had been left on, stocked with a welcome bottle of local white wine, and I may have made a small noise of genuine gratitude.

Lignano Pineta is not the Italy of grand cathedrals and Renaissance masterpieces. It is something better, at least for a family who have spent the last term rushing between school runs and work deadlines. The pineta itself, that distinctive pine forest that gives the area its name, presses right up against the residential streets. You can cycle through it on paths that feel properly shady even at midday. We had brought bikes, rented locally from a chap who spoke approximately four words of English and communicated mainly through enthusiastic gestures. He was brilliant. Within an hour of arriving, we were wobbling along sandy tracks towards the beach, the children shrieking every time a pine cone dropped near them.

The beach, when we reached it, was the sort that makes you forgive every wrong turn and every overheated argument in a hire car. Wide and sandy, with gentle shallows where the water warms up properly by June. We did not do anything remarkable there. Built a lopsided sandcastle. Ate gelato from a nearby kiosk. I got sunburned on the back of my knees because I forgot to reapply cream, which is apparently a tradition I cannot escape. The children collected shells they would later abandon in the hire car. It was perfect in its ordinariness.

Back at the cottage, evenings settled into an easy rhythm. I cooked simple things from the local supermarket, pasta mostly, with tomatoes that actually tasted of something. We ate outside as the light faded through the pines, the children growing slowly quieter as the day caught up with them. One night I sat alone on that terrace with the last of the welcome wine, listening to cicadas and the distant murmur of other families doing much the same. I thought about how I had stressed over the booking, over the packing, over whether this would be the right kind of holiday. How I always do. And how, once again, the simple formula of a modest house, a bit of outdoor space, and nowhere particular to be had proved exactly what we needed.

The roundabout mishap became our running joke. For the rest of the week, any minor disaster, a dropped ice cream, a lost flip-flop, was met with someone shouting that we should just circle back to the roundabout and start again. Family humour is odd like that. It does not travel well, but it matters enormously in the moment.

We did not venture far. A morning at the nearby thermal baths, because this is Friuli and apparently you should. A wander through the local market for cheese and cured meats that we ate with our fingers back at the cottage. An afternoon when it rained and we played cards badly while I attempted to describe the rules of rummy to children who had invented their own version and were not interested in correction. That was the week, really. Small things, done slowly, together.

I have had holidays where I came back needing another holiday. This was not one of them. We returned with sand in the suitcases, slightly too much colour on our noses, and that particular peace that comes from having done very little very happily. The key went back in the lockbox without fumbling. I even remembered the code.