I should have known the sat nav was up to no good when it tried to send us through what looked like someone's vegetable patch just outside Ljubljana. Three hours of driving from the airport, two motorway services, and one very questionable ham roll later, we finally spotted the sign for Celje Lasko. My wife gave me that look. You know the one. The "I told you we should have flown to Spain" look. Fair enough, really. I'd been banging on about Slovenia's hidden gems for weeks.

The mishap came, as these things always do, at the exact moment we felt most triumphant. We'd navigated the winding lanes, admired the rolling green hills of Savinjska, and even spotted a deer standing in a meadow like something from a Disney film. Then I turned into the property's gravel drive, feeling rather pleased with myself, and promptly scraped the hire car's bumper on a low stone wall that was absolutely not visible from the driver's seat. The deer probably laughed. A horrifying crunch, followed by my son's delighted voice from the back seat: "Dad's done a bad park." He's four. He's merciless.

We sat there for a moment, engine running, me wondering how to explain this to the rental company and my wife wondering how to explain me to her mother. But then the door of the neighbouring cottage opened, and an elderly gentleman waved cheerfully as if scraping stone walls was the traditional Slovenian welcome. This broke the tension somewhat. We gathered ourselves, extracted the luggage from the boot with the careful dignity of people pretending everything was fine, and actually looked at where we'd be staying for the next week.

The place had that immediate cottage charm that photographs never quite capture properly. Wooden beams, slightly uneven floors that creaked in satisfying places, and a kitchen that smelled faintly of previous occupants' cooking adventures. My daughter ran straight upstairs to claim the bedroom with the sloped ceiling, declaring it "her princess tower," which apparently justified spreading her entire collection of small plastic animals across every available surface within seven minutes of arrival.

I busied myself with the important holiday rituals. Kettle on. Windows opened to let in that remarkable country air, all grass and woodsmoke and something floral I couldn't identify. The garden stretched out behind the cottage, modest but properly green, with a terrace where I could already picture myself sitting with a local beer while the children exhausted themselves on the lawn. My wife unpacked with the efficient purpose of someone who knows exactly where everything should go, while I performed my traditional role of holding things and asking "does this go in here?" at regular intervals.

By late afternoon, the sat nav disaster and the bumper incident had faded into that comfortable category of "well, we're here now." The children discovered a family of cats living near the woodshed and immediately appointed themselves official feeding coordinators. I discovered that the local shop sold a dark beer called Lasko, which seemed appropriate given our location, and drank one on that terrace while the evening sun did something genuinely beautiful to the hills across the valley.

That first evening, we didn't do much of anything. A simple pasta dinner using ingredients we'd brought, eaten at the wooden table with windows open to the cooling air. The children fell asleep almost before their heads hit the pillows, travel-tired and cat-happy. My wife and I sat outside with another beer, listening to nothing much at all except distant birds and the occasional tractor from somewhere over the hill.

I thought about that stone wall, and the sat nav, and my son's gleeful commentary. The small embarrassments of family travel that somehow become the stories you keep. Here we were, slightly battered hire car and all, in a part of Slovenia I'd barely heard of six months ago, already feeling like we'd made the right choice despite everything. There's something about arriving somewhere unfamiliar, the first evening when you're still working out the light switches and the neighbours' routines, that carries a particular gentle excitement. The holiday hasn't properly started yet, but the potential of it stretches ahead, unspoiled, full of ordinary pleasures waiting to be discovered.

The cats came back at dusk, and my wife went to bed, and I sat there a while longer, watching the last light fade over Savinjska, already plotting tomorrow's very modest adventures and hoping the sat nav had learned its lesson.