I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send us up what I can only describe as a goat's idea of a shortcut. Three hours from Ancona airport, two increasingly restless children in the back, and one husband stubbornly refusing to admit we were lost. Classic start to a family holiday, really.

The road to Apecchio was meant to be straightforward. It wasn't. We ended up winding through some frankly spectacular countryside, mind you, olive groves clinging to hillsides like they'd been painted there, little stone farmhouses appearing round every bend. But spectacular doesn't quite compensate when your seven-year-old is asking if we're there yet for the forty-third time and you've just spotted a wild boar crossing sign that feels uncomfortably relevant to your current driving situation.

The mishap, though. The proper one. We'd stopped in a village barely big enough for its own church, all of us desperate for the loo and a restorative packet of crisps. I jumped out to ask directions from a lovely old chap leaning against a wall, doing that very Italian thing of apparently holding up the building through sheer force of personality. My Italian stretches to ordering wine and apologising, sometimes simultaneously. His dialect stretched to somewhere beyond Babel. Through elaborate hand gestures and me inexplicably miming driving a car like a complete fool, I gathered we needed to go back the way we'd come. What I hadn't gathered was that I'd left the car door wide open. Our youngest, bless her, had decided this was the perfect moment to redistribute her entire snack collection across the back seat. We discovered this twenty minutes later when a packet of Hula Hoops somehow worked its way under the brake pedal. Family holidays, eh.

By the time we actually found the place, up a proper gravel track that the sat nav had definitely not approved of, I was ready to weep with relief. And then I did, a bit, because there it was. Proper stone farmhouse, roses scrambling up the walls, that particular hush you only get when you're properly in the middle of nowhere. The sort of hush that's actually full of noise if you listen - cicadas, distant church bells, some dog having opinions somewhere.

The owner, a woman called Luisa with the kind of warm efficiency that makes you feel immediately inadequate about your own life organisation, showed us round. The pool was the first thing the children clocked, obviously, already half-undressed before she'd finished explaining the filter system. I was more taken with the covered terrace, that lovely rustic kitchen with its big fireplace, the sense that this was a house that had actually been lived in properly rather than assembled from a holiday let catalogue. The bedrooms were simple, cool, with those wooden shutters that actually keep the morning light out - crucial when you're hoping for a lie-in past six.

Standing there with a welcome glass of something local and fizzy, watching my lot already bickering happily over who'd claimed which bit of the garden, I felt that particular shift. The one where you stop being the person who organises everything and just... be. For a bit. The getting there had been typically chaotic, typically us. But we'd got there. And sometimes that's enough.