Getting to Trequanda was supposed to be the easy bit. We had flown into Pisa, picked up the hire car, and felt rather smug about our planning. The sat nav said two hours, maybe two and a half. What it did not account for was my husband's unshakeable belief that he could navigate by "the position of the sun" after I accidentally dropped the printed directions into a puddle at the airport. Three hours later, we were hopelessly lost somewhere between Siena and what felt like the actual middle of nowhere, bickering about whether that cypress tree looked familiar.

We finally found the turning, a narrow gravel track winding through olive groves, and I will admit I felt a flutter of something. Not just relief that the children had stopped asking if we were nearly there, but genuine excitement. The property sat perched on a gentle hillside, a proper stone farmhouse with terracotta roof tiles and shutters that had clearly seen a few decades of Tuscan summers. It looked exactly like the photographs, which almost never happens.

The key was in the lockbox as promised, though it took me an embarrassingly long time to remember the code. Standing there in the late afternoon heat, punching in random combinations while my daughter asked why Mummy was counting out loud, I had one of those moments. You know the ones. Here I was, supposedly in charge of this family holiday, and I could not recall four simple digits. I had remembered to pack fourteen pairs of socks for a three-night stay, yet my brain had entirely evacuated the code. My husband, naturally, chose this moment to be helpful by suggesting I try "something obvious." I resisted the urge to suggest something obvious back at him.

The door swung open eventually, and the smell hit us first. That particular dry, warm scent of old stone and wooden beams and somewhere, faintly, lavender. The interior was simple and unpretentious, exactly what you want from a cottage holiday rather than some glossy hotel pretending to be rustic. Terracotta floors, a kitchen with actual cooking pots rather than decorative ones, furniture that looked lived-in rather than staged for a photograph. The children bolted straight past me to investigate upstairs, and I heard my son declare that he had claimed the room with the view.

I wandered through to the kitchen, opened the wooden shutters, and there it was. Rolling hills striped with vineyards, a cluster of cypress trees standing sentinel on the ridge, the whole landscape bathed in that golden light that makes Tuscany look like someone has applied an Instagram filter to reality. I stood there with my hand still on the shutter catch, feeling slightly ridiculous about how emotional I was getting over a view. But honestly, after the journey, after the puddle, after the sun-navigation debacle, it felt earned.

My daughter appeared at my elbow, demanding to know if there was a swimming pool. There was, apparently, though we had not found it yet. She also wanted to know what was for dinner, which was an excellent question given that our planned supermarket stop had been abandoned during our scenic detour. I found a jar of local honey in the cupboard, some pasta, and made a mental note to find the nearest village shop in the morning.

By evening, we were sitting outside with glasses of something local and red, watching the swallows dart about as the light faded. The children were filthy from exploring the garden, my husband was actually reading a book rather than checking work emails, and I had that rare sensation of my shoulders dropping away from my ears. The mishaps of the journey already felt like part of the story rather than the whole story.

That is the thing about a cottage holiday, I think. Nobody is making your bed or cooking your dinner or organising your entertainment. You have to lean into the slightly chaotic reality of it, the forgotten codes and the improvised meals and the children arguing over who gets which bedroom. But sitting there as the first stars appeared, honey-sweetened pasta notwithstanding, I could not have wanted to be anywhere else.