I have never been so happy to see a washing machine in my life, and that is not a sentence I ever expected to write.

The drive from Trieste Airport had taken the best part of three hours, which in itself was not the problem. The problem was that somewhere around Udine, I had convinced myself that a large takeaway coffee was an excellent idea. It was not. By the time we wound our way up into the Carnic Alps, my bladder was staging a full-scale rebellion against the rest of my body. I use the word "wound" deliberately. These roads do not go in straight lines. They curl and twist like a dropped strand of spaghetti, each bend revealing another breathtaking view that I was in absolutely no condition to appreciate.

My partner, who had sensibly abstained from caffeine, found this hilarious. She kept pointing out church towers and mountain ridges, saying things like "Look, you can see Austria from here," while I gripped the steering wheel and made small whimpering noises.

We finally reached Paluzza as the afternoon light was turning golden, which sounds romantic unless you are navigating a hire car through streets barely wider than a supermarket aisle while desperately scanning for a toilet. The property, a converted stone farmhouse on the edge of the village, sat at the end of a gravel track that made a sound like breakfast cereal under the wheels. I abandoned the car at what I later learned was a completely wrong angle, half-blocking the neighbour's access, and performed what can only be described as a dignity-free sprint to the front door.

The key was in the lockbox, which of course required a code, which of course I had saved on my phone, which of course had no signal. I stood there doing a sort of anxious dance while my partner calmly produced the printed booking confirmation from her bag. She had printed it. In 2024. I married well.

The door opened onto a kitchen that smelled faintly of woodsmoke and rosemary, and I will spare you the details of the next ninety seconds except to say that the downstairs bathroom became my immediate best friend. When I emerged, considerably more human, I actually looked at the place properly for the first time.

It was worth the wait. The kitchen had terracotta floors worn smooth by decades of use, and a long wooden table that looked like it had hosted a thousand slow lunches. Through the open door I could see a covered terrace with a view down the valley, the mountains rising on either side like walls of a different world. A wood-burning stove sat in the corner, stacked with logs that someone had already prepared. The whole place had that particular stillness of houses that have been lived in properly, not decorated for show.

I walked back outside, slightly embarrassed by my earlier panic, and found my partner unpacking the car with what I can only describe as smug efficiency. She handed me a cold beer from the fridge, which I had not even noticed contained anything yet, and we stood on that terrace as the light faded and the first stars appeared between the mountain peaks.

The neighbour, a white-haired man in blue overalls, appeared at the boundary of his vegetable garden and nodded at our crooked parking with what I chose to interpret as amused tolerance rather than active judgement. I raised my beer in what I hoped was a friendly, apologetic gesture. He nodded again and went back to his beans.

That first evening, we did almost nothing. We sat. We looked at the mountains. We ate bread and cheese from a shop in Paluzza village that I would later learn closes promptly at half twelve and woe betide anyone who arrives at twelve thirty-one. The woodsmoke smell turned out to be from the neighbour's chimney, drifting across in the cooling air.

I kept thinking I should be doing something. Checking my phone, making plans, researching walks. But the signal was patchy at best, and somehow the urgency drained out of me with each sip of that beer. The mishap of the journey, my ridiculous sprint, even the crooked car, all of it felt already distant, like a story about someone slightly more foolish than myself.

We went to bed early, exhausted by driving and altitude and the simple shock of arrival. The bedroom had wooden shutters that opened onto the same mountain view, and I lay there for a while listening to nothing much at all, no traffic, no planes, just the occasional rustle of something in the garden and my partner's steady breathing beside me.

I thought about how I had rushed through that first hour, desperate to arrive, desperate for the bathroom, desperate to get on with the holiday. And now here I was, finally still, in a place that seemed to operate on an entirely different rhythm. The mountains were not going anywhere. The stone house had stood for generations. My urgency had been entirely my own invention.

I fell asleep wondering what else I might be wrong about, which is not a thought that comes to me often, and which I suspect is one of the better reasons to travel anywhere at all.