The sat-nav had other ideas about how to reach Bagolino, which is how I found myself halfway up a goat track above Lake Idro, questioning every life choice that had led me to trust technology over a paper map. My wife was doing that particular breathing she does when she is being extremely patient. The children had gone suspiciously quiet in the back, which meant they were either asleep or plotting something. Turns out they were eating an entire packet of travel sweets in complete silence, like tiny sugar-fuelled spies.

We had set off from Bergamo airport full of optimism and slightly too much airport coffee. The plan was simple: find our holiday cottage, unpack, open wine, collapse. The reality involved three-point turns on roads built for donkeys, a heated debate about whether that was a road sign or a local warning about falling rocks, and me confidently declaring "this is definitely the scenic route" approximately forty minutes after we had missed the actual route.

When we finally found the place, I nearly drove straight past it. The cottage sat tucked into the hillside with that particular Italian knack for looking both rustic and somehow perfectly composed, like it had been arranged by someone with excellent taste and a mild obsession with geraniums. Stone walls, wooden shutters, a terrace that caught the afternoon light. I felt immediately better about my navigational failures. My wife felt better about marrying me, or at least she stopped doing the breathing.

The key was in a lockbox that I had written the code for on my phone, which of course had died somewhere around the goat track. Cue another ten minutes of me patting pockets and making increasingly desperate guesses while the children asked if this was "part of the adventure." I eventually remembered I had photographed the booking details on my wife's phone, which she produced with the air of someone who had known this would happen and had been waiting for her moment. She was absolutely right, and I told her so, which earned me a smile and the key.

Stepping inside was like walking into someone's well-loved home rather than a rental property. Proper wooden beams, not the fake kind that look like they came from a garden centre. A kitchen that actually had more than one blunt knife and a tin opener. The previous guests had left a bottle of local wine on the table with a note saying "enjoy" in three languages, which struck me as the sort of small kindness that makes holidays properly memorable.

I opened the shutters while my wife investigated whether the coffee maker worked. The view down the valley was ridiculous in that understated Italian way, green slopes folding into each other with the lake glinting somewhere below. Our youngest immediately claimed the bedroom with the bunk beds. Our oldest disappeared onto the terrace with her headphones, though I noticed she kept looking up at the mountains rather than at her phone, which felt like a minor parental victory.

That first evening we walked into the village, which took all of seven minutes and involved saying hello to three cats and one extremely old man who may or may not have been judging my sandals. We bought bread from a shop where the woman spoke no English and my Italian stretched to "grazie" and pointing, and somehow this felt like exactly the right level of communication. Back at the cottage, we ate cheese and tomatoes on the terrace as the light went golden, and I realised I had not thought about work emails for at least four hours.

The mishap with the sat-nav became the story we told over dinner, already growing funnier in the telling. That is the thing about family holidays, I think. The wrong turn becomes the memory. The getting lost becomes the finding.