I have never been particularly good with sat navs, and my first introduction to San Lorenzo al Mare proved this beyond all doubt. There we were, my family and I, crawling along the Ligurian coast in a hire car that smelled faintly of pine air freshener and regret, while a robotic voice insisted we turn into what was clearly someone's olive grove. My wife gave me that look. You know the one. The children had already begun the backseat bickering that would become the soundtrack to our entire journey. I pressed on, quite literally, grinding the Fiat up a gravel track until a furious dog and an even more furious nonna sent us packing back toward the main road.

Three wrong turns and one deeply questionable pasty from a motorway services later, we finally spotted the stone walls and terracotta roof of our holiday home. It sat there like a promise, tucked between citrus trees and bougainvillea, with the faintest whisper of sea salt in the warm afternoon air. I killed the engine. Nobody spoke. Then my youngest simply said, "Can we swim now?" and the spell was broken.

The owner, a wiry man called Marco who spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it exclusively from football commentary, handed over keys and a bottle of his own limoncello. "For the shock," he said, nodding at the car's dusty flanks with what I chose to interpret as sympathy rather than judgment. The limoncello was excellent, by the way. We sampled it immediately, standing in the small courtyard with our bags still unpacked around us like a luggage obstacle course.

The house itself was exactly the sort of unpretentious cottage you hope for but rarely find. Terracotta floors that stayed cool beneath bare feet. Wooden shutters that creaked in a satisfying, well-worn way. A kitchen that had clearly seen decades of proper cooking, not the performative kind you see on television. My wife ran her hand along the marble worktop and actually smiled, which I took as personal redemption for the olive grove incident.

What struck me most, though, was the smell. Lemon trees somewhere nearby, definitely. Fresh laundry drying in the sun, absolutely. But underneath it all, that particular Mediterranean scent of dust and herbs and proximity to the sea. It smelled like childhood holidays I had never actually had but somehow remembered anyway.

We did not do much that first evening. The children discovered the hammock and fought over it with the intensity of siblings who have been travelling too long. I attempted to assemble a barbecue of questionable vintage while my wife unpacked with the military efficiency she brings to all domestic operations. We ate bread and cheese and tomatoes that tasted of actual sunlight, sitting at a wrought-iron table that wobbled slightly on the uneven tiles. Marco's limoncello made a second appearance.

Later, once the children finally surrendered to exhaustion, my wife and I sat with the shutters open and listened to the distant murmur of the sea. The dog that had chased us earlier was, I imagined, sleeping peacefully in his olive grove. The sat nav sat silent and judgmental on the kitchen counter.

I thought about how easily I could have ruined this. How my stubbornness with directions, my refusal to simply stop and ask, had cost us an hour of precious holiday time and whatever dignity I had left. But then I looked at my wife's bare feet on the cool tiles, at the half-finished limoncello catching the moonlight, at the whole unhurried sweetness of this ordinary moment.

Some holidays announce themselves with grandeur. Others, like this one, simply wait for you to catch up. I raised my glass to nothing in particular, and to everything. The sea murmured back. Tomorrow we would explore properly, find the beach, perhaps master that wretched barbecue. Tonight, though, we had arrived. Eventually. And somehow that felt like enough.