I'll write this article about a family holiday at a cottage in Badesi, Sardinia, focusing on arrival and first impressions with a light, conversational tone.

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Right, so picture this: four hours into a journey that was meant to take two and a half, and I am standing in a petrol station forecourt just outside Sassari, arguing with a sat nav that has decided "Badesi" sounds roughly like "anywhere in northern Sardinia, really." The kids are in the back, already on their third packet of crisps, and my other half is doing that patient breathing thing. I had printed directions. I had them in my hand, in fact. Did I look at them? Reader, I did not. Pride, fall, all of that.

We found the turning eventually, after a slightly heated debate about whether that vineyard looked familiar. The road wound down through scrubby macchia, all wild rosemary and low stone walls, and suddenly there was the sea, proper turquoise, the sort of colour that makes you think your sunglasses are lying to you. The sat nav gave one last triumphant beep and fell silent, as if it had planned the whole detour for dramatic effect.

The cottage sat on a gentle slope, nothing fancy, just whitewashed walls and a terrace that looked like it had seen a few family barbecues in its time. The key was in the lockbox exactly where the email said, which felt like a small miracle given my navigational performance. I fumbled the code twice, conscious of the children doing their best "hurry up, Dad" shuffle behind me.

Then the door opened and that smell hit me. You know the one. Warm plaster, a bit of cedar from the wardrobe, something faintly lemony from the cleaning. It smelled like every family holiday I had as a kid, rolled into one. The kids shot past me to claim bedrooms, naturally, and I stood in the little kitchen with its slightly wonky tiles and thought: this is exactly the sort of place where you forget to check your phone for whole afternoons.

The terrace was the real winner, though. Plastic chairs, a table with a wobble that would need a folded beer mat, and a view straight down to the coast. My daughter announced she could see the sea from the loo window, which she considered a significant selling point. We unpacked badly, as families do, bags exploding across the twin beds, someone already asking about tea before I'd found the kettle.

I made a fool of myself with the gas hob, obviously. Couldn't get the igniter working, stood there clicking away like a broken metronome until my youngest wandered over and turned the knob the other way. There's a particular humility to being shown up by an eight-year-old in a foreign kitchen. I laughed, though, proper laughed, which I don't do enough of on normal Tuesdays.

By late afternoon we were on that terrace with bread from the little supermarket we'd passed, some pecorino that tasted of actual sheep, and tomatoes that made me briefly angry about the ones we get at home. The wobble in the table didn't matter. The kids were quiet, mouths full, watching the light change on the water. My other half caught my eye and did a small shrug that meant, well, here we are then.

And here we were. Tired, slightly crispy from the drive, surrounded by the particular chaos of a family still learning where everything lives in a new kitchen. I had got us lost, forgotten to buy milk, and been outsmarted by a gas hob. But sitting there, with the smell of wild rosemary drifting up from the hillside and the sea doing its glittering thing below, I thought: this is why we do it, isn't it? The getting there, the small disasters, the plastic chairs. The simplicity of it. No hotel buffet, no entertainment schedule, just us and a wobbly table and a week stretching out like the view below.

I went to bed that night on slightly crunchy sheets, windows open to the sound of nothing much at all, already plotting tomorrow's argument with the coffee pot.