I have never been so relieved to see a set of house keys in a plastic box as I was after our three-hour drive from Tivat Airport. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Budva old town, my wife had started doing that quiet breathing thing she does when she is trying not to say something she will regret, and our youngest had just been spectacularly sick into a carrier bag at the roundabout by Jaz Beach. Welcome to the Kotor Riviera, I thought. This is going splendidly.

The final stretch up to Krimovice was where things got properly comical. The road narrowed to something I would generously call a generous path, and I found myself reversing fifty yards for a local in a battered Renault who clearly had no intention of yielding to a British hire car driven by a man who had already proven his incompetence with a sick bag. My wife helpfully noted that the stone walls on either side were probably older than our entire house back in Suffolk. I did not find this comforting.

Then we rounded the final bend and there it was, perched on its hillside with the kind of view that makes you forgive absolutely everything. The stone villa sat among olive trees and terraced gardens, looking out over the bay towards Kotor itself, those mountains rising straight from the water like something from a film set. For a moment nobody spoke. Even the child who had decorated the Renault's interior seemed struck into silence. It might have been awe. It might have been residual nausea. Either way, I will take it.

The key box opened with a satisfying clunk and we stumbled inside, luggage and sick bags and all. The first thing that hit me was the smell of pine coming through open shutters, mixed with something faintly herby from the garden. The second thing was the realisation that I had somehow booked a place with significantly more levels than I had anticipated, which meant a great deal of huffing and puffing with suitcases while pretending this was exactly the cardio I had wanted.

My daughter immediately claimed the upper terrace as her territory, shrieking about being able to see a cruise ship that looked like a toy from up here. My wife disappeared into the kitchen and emerged looking almost emotional about the coffee machine. I stood on the middle balcony with a beer I had found in the welcome pack, because apparently this is the sort of place that leaves you beer and local wine, and I watched the light change over the water as afternoon turned to evening.

Here is the gentle self-reflection part, since I promised one. I am terrible at holidays. Truly awful. I spend the first day fretting about work emails I cannot check, the second day adjusting to the terrible reality that nobody needs me for anything, and usually by the third day I have relaxed enough to start fretting about going home. But standing there with that beer, watching my family unpack their chaos across this hillside house, listening to my wife laugh at something the children had done with the outdoor shower, I felt something shift. The wrong turn at Budva, the sick bag, the reversing incident, the general indignity of travel with small humans, it all faded into something that felt like the beginning of something rather than the end of my sanity.

We did not do anything remarkable that first evening. We grilled some fish from a market in Kotor, ate too much bread, let the children stay up far too late watching the lights come on across the bay. I tripped over the step to the terrace and spilled my second beer, which my wife found funnier than was strictly necessary. The mountains went dark against a sky full of stars I had forgotten existed.

That was our arrival at Krimovice. No great adventure, no cultural enlightenment, just a slightly battered family finding their feet in a stone house on a Montenegrin hillside, already wondering if we could possibly stay forever.