I have always believed that the best holidays begin with something going slightly wrong, if only to give you a story to tell over dinner later. Our trip to Cavallino Treporti proved me absolutely right.

The journey from Stansted to Venice Marco Polo had been mercifully uneventful, which should have been my first warning. We collected our hire car, a Fiat 500 that felt roughly the size of a shopping trolley, and set off for what the sat nav promised would be a forty-minute drive. An hour and a half later, we were still circling roundabouts near Mestre, having missed the turn for the Ponte della Liberta three times. My partner, who had insisted on navigating "the old-fashioned way" by which he meant squinting at his phone while I white-knuckled the steering wheel, finally admitted defeat and let the robot voice take over.

The real mishap came as we finally approached Cavallino Treporti itself. I spotted a supermarket and, in my wisdom, decided we needed provisions before finding the property. Reversing into a parking space, I misjudged the distance by approximately the length of a small Italian grandmother and crunched the rear bumper against a concrete pillar. The sound was spectacular. The damage, thankfully, was not. But the Fiat now bore a scratch that would require some creative explaining at the rental desk come Saturday.

Flustered and muttering apologies to no one in particular, I loaded up with pasta, local wine, and what I believed to be mozzarella but later discovered was some kind of smoked cheese that smelled faintly of barnyards. We pressed on.

The property, when we finally located it down a sandy track lined with maritime pines, revealed itself gradually. A low, weathered fence. A garden that had clearly made peace with the coastal winds. The house sat modest and unassuming, painted in that particular faded terracotta you see everywhere in this corner of Veneto, as if the sun itself had decided to leave a permanent watermark.

I fumbled with the key safe, dropping the code twice into the dusty gravel, before the door swung open and that particular smell hit me. Salt, pine resin, and something older, something that spoke of decades of summer holidays and closed winters. The tiles were cool underfoot, patterned in that slightly dizzying geometric style that seems mandatory in Italian seaside properties. The kitchen window framed a view of scrubby garden giving way to lagoon, and beyond that, the distant shimmer that might have been the Adriatic or might have been heat haze, I could not yet tell.

My partner, ever practical, immediately began investigating the coffee maker. I wandered through to the small terrace, where a plastic table and four chairs sat waiting with the patience of furniture that has seen many temporary occupants come and go. A lizard darted across the wall. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked once and thought better of it.

I stood there, still wearing my airport clothes, still smelling of recycled aeroplane air and rental car plastic, and felt something in my shoulders begin to loosen. The bumper incident already felt like it belonged to someone else's holiday, someone more competent and less lucky. Here, the afternoon light fell differently, thicker and more golden, as if filtered through honey. The lagoon stretched out flat and silver-green, and a small fishing boat puttered past with an engine note like an elderly lawnmower.

My partner emerged with two cups of something dark and promising. We sat on those plastic chairs, neither of us speaking much, watching the light change and a heron land awkwardly on a wooden post. The smoked cheese remained in its bag, unopened and suspicious. The wine did not.

That first evening, we walked to the nearest stretch of beach, perhaps ten minutes through pine woods that smelled of resin and evening coolness. The sand was coarse, scattered with shells and the occasional fragment of coloured glass worn smooth by tide and time. We paddled like children, yelping at the temperature, while the sun settled into the water in that leisurely way it has in late summer.

Back at the house, we ate pasta with supermarket sauce and drank too much of the local red, sitting with the doors open to let in the night sounds. Somewhere, a neighbour was playing music faintly, something with an accordion that should have been corny but somehow was not. Mosquitoes found us eventually, because they always do, and we retreated with slapstick haste, laughing and cursing in equal measure.

Lying in the unfamiliar bed later, listening to unfamiliar silence broken only by cicadas and the occasional distant motor, I thought about that bumper. About my terrible navigation, my questionable cheese identification, my general unsuitability for anything resembling smooth travel. And I smiled in the darkness, because this was exactly why we had come. Not for perfection, but for this particular, imperfect now, for the smell of pine and salt, for plastic chairs and questionable wine, for the gentle absurdity of being temporarily elsewhere.

The heron, I decided, had the right idea. Land badly if you must, but land somewhere beautiful.