I'd never driven a left-hand-drive hire car through rural Galicia before, and it showed. Somewhere between Santiago de Compostela airport and the village of A Peroxa, I managed to scrape the passenger wing mirror against a stone wall while trying to let a tractor pass. My wife gave me that look. You know the one. The children found it hysterical, of course. "Dad's broken the car before we've even got there," my youngest announced, as if this were some kind of achievement worth broadcasting.

The satnav had been losing its nerve for the last twenty minutes, directing us down lanes that felt increasingly like farm tracks. Stone houses with rusted iron balconies slipped past. Then suddenly, there it was: a traditional Galician stone cottage with a proper horreo, one of those raised granaries on stilts, standing guard in the garden like a wooden spider. The sort of thing you see on postcards and assume has been demolished by progress. But no. This was ours for the week.

I fumbled with the lockbox code, still rattled from the mirror incident and now convinced I'd forgotten how numbers worked. The door swung open to that particular hush that old stone buildings have. Cool air. The faint smell of wood polish and something else, something green and growing that drifted in from the garden. The children bolted past me, arguing over bedrooms before I'd even set down the bags.

The sitting room had one of those fireplaces you actually want to use, not the decorative sort that mocks you from the corner. Beamed ceiling, slightly uneven floors that creaked in all the right places. My wife ran her hand along the stone wall and raised an eyebrow at me, the silent translation being: alright, perhaps the mirror was worth it.

I stepped outside to assess the damage to the car and found myself distracted by the garden instead. An old stone bench beneath a fig tree. A small pool glinting in the afternoon light. Beyond the low wall, nothing but hills and the distant suggestion of woodland. No traffic noise. Just a dog barking somewhere, and birds that sounded nothing like the pigeons I'm used to back in Birmingham.

The mishap with the mirror had thrown me, I'll admit. I stood there feeling slightly ridiculous, a middle-aged man in a hire car with a wounded wing, pretending he knew how to slow down properly. But that's the thing about arriving somewhere like A Peroxa. The place doesn't care about your small disasters. It simply waits, patient and solid, while you remember how to breathe differently.

My daughter appeared at my elbow, offering me a fig she'd picked without permission. "It's not ripe," she admitted, after I'd bitten into it. The sourness made my eyes water. She laughed, properly laughed, the way she doesn't much at home anymore now she's twelve.

We spent that first evening doing almost nothing. Sat on the terrace with bread and cheese from a shop we'd found in the nearest village, watching the light change over the hills. The children splashed in the pool until their lips went blue. I made a fire in the grate despite it being September and not remotely necessary, because the cottage seemed to expect it of me.

The mirror would need sorting eventually. The car hire company would need a call. But that evening, with my family scattered around me in various states of damp contentment, I found I couldn't quite muster the energy to worry. Some holidays announce themselves with drama and itinerary. This one simply opened its door, handed us a slightly unripe fig, and suggested we might like to stay a while.