I have never been so relieved to see a swimming pool in my entire life, and that includes the time I nearly drowned at Center Parcs as a teenager. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning, which was a very long drive from Treviso Airport that my husband swore would take ninety minutes and actually took closer to three hours. We blame the sat nav. And the Prosecco region's insistence on having winding roads that seem designed by someone who really enjoys watching tourists suffer.

The mishap, then. We had packed with military precision for our week at Borgo Valbelluna, or so I thought. Two children, enough snacks to survive a small siege, and what I believed was a thoroughly downloaded map. What I had actually downloaded was a photograph of a map. A photograph. I discovered this somewhere outside Vittorio Veneto when the signal vanished and I was left staring at a JPEG of northern Italy while my husband made that particular face he does when he is trying very hard not to say something that will make me cry in a hire car.

We stopped at a petrol station where I attempted to ask directions using a combination of broken Italian, dramatic hand gestures, and pointing at the property address on my phone like it was a wanted poster. The man behind the counter took pity on me, or perhaps he just wanted the performance to end, and drew a route on an actual paper napkin. I have kept that napkin. It is currently framed in my kitchen as a monument to my own incompetence.

By the time we crawled up the final approach to Borgo Valbelluna, the children had reached that dangerous level of boredom where they start asking philosophical questions about existence, and I had eaten an entire family bag of crisps by myself. But then we rounded the last bend and there it was, nestled in the Valbelluna valley with the Dolomites watching over everything like patient grey giants. The sort of view that makes you forgive a certain amount of navigational humiliation.

The property itself is part of a converted farmhouse complex, all honey-coloured stone and terracotta roofs, with a shared garden that my daughter immediately declared was "bigger than our entire school" and my son attempted to measure by running around it at full pelt until he fell over. The pool was the first thing we spotted, shimmering there like a promise, and I think all four of us had the same thought simultaneously. The children wanted to jump in. I wanted to lie beside it and pretend the napkin incident had never happened.

Our apartment was on the ground floor, which proved wise given the amount of luggage we had somehow accumulated for seven nights. Inside, it had that particular Italian country style that manages to be both rustic and somehow elegant, with terracotta floors that stayed deliciously cool underfoot and wooden beams that my husband spent an alarming amount of time inspecting for craftsmanship. The kitchen was compact but properly equipped, not one of those holiday let kitchens where you open a drawer and find a single blunt knife and a tin opener from 1973. I could actually cook there, which was fortunate because the nearest restaurant was a drive away and I had no intention of getting back in that car until absolutely necessary.

That first evening, we sat on our small terrace with bread and cheese from a shop in Mel we had passed in our confused circling, watching the light change over the valley. The children were asleep within minutes, exhausted by pool exertions and the emotional trauma of my map failure. My husband and I just sat there, not talking much, drinking something local and white and cold, feeling that particular relief of having arrived somewhere that immediately feels like it might let you breathe properly for a while.

I keep thinking about that napkin, though. About how sometimes the wrong turn leads you to a petrol station kindness, and how getting lost is not always the disaster it feels like in the moment. The Valbelluna valley does not hurry. The mountains have been there for millions of years; they are not impressed by your schedule. I arrived frazzled and slightly ashamed of my own technological dependence, and within twenty-four hours I was swimming slow lengths while my children invented elaborate diving competitions, and I genuinely could not remember what I had been stressed about.

The pool, I should mention, is shared between the properties, which meant occasional polite negotiations with other families about who had priority, conducted mostly in smiles and broken English and the universal language of children shrieking with delight. It became part of the rhythm. Mornings for exploring the garden, which had fig trees and lavender and enough space for proper games of tag. Afternoons for the pool, for reading on a lounger while keeping one eye on whoever was attempting the most ambitious cannonball. Evenings for simple cooking and early nights, because the country darkness here is different, heavier somehow, and sleep comes easily.

We did venture to Mel one morning, a proper little Veneto town with a castle on a hill and a Wednesday market where I bought far more cheese than was strictly necessary. The children were bribed through the cultural portion with promises of gelato, which we found at a place near the cathedral where the owner seemed genuinely delighted by their attempts to order in Italian. My son asked for "two balls please" with such earnestness that I nearly choked on my caffe. These are the moments, I suppose. The small, ridiculous, perfectly ordinary moments that somehow stack up into a holiday you actually remember.

By our final day, I had stopped checking my phone for signal. I had learned to identify the particular birdsong that started each morning, and to anticipate the way the afternoon sun moved across the terrace, creating a patch of shade perfect for a certain hour of reading. I had not solved any great problems or had any profound revelations. I had simply slowed down, which in my normal life feels almost transgressive.

We left the napkin behind, accidentally, tucked into a guidebook that stayed on the shelf. I like to imagine it still there, waiting for the next lost traveller, a small paper monument to the kindness of strangers and the particular comedy of modern navigation. The sat nav worked perfectly on the return journey, of course. It always does when you no longer desperately need it to.