I have never been a natural at packing light, and our journey to Aledo proved it in spectacular fashion. There we were, three hours into the drive from Alicante airport, the hire car smelling faintly of warm plastic and my optimism, when I realised my swimming trunks were still dangling from the washing line back in Sheffield. My wife gave me that particular look she has perfected over fifteen years of marriage, the one that says "I love you but honestly, how do you function?" The kids found it hilarious, naturally. Nothing delights children quite like parental incompetence.

The road to Aledo winds up through the Murcian countryside in a series of cheerful switchbacks that had my youngest declaring it "better than a rollercoaster" and my eldest turning a delicate shade of green. Olive groves marched across the hillsides in neat, silvery rows, and every so often we'd pass a tiny village where old men sat outside bars with their morning beers, watching the world crawl by at approximately their own pace. I found myself envying them intensely.

Aledo itself sits perched on a ridge like someone carefully placed it there for maximum dramatic effect. The old town walls come into view first, honey-coloured stone glowing in the afternoon sun, and you immediately understand why people bother with the climb. Our cottage, tucked just below the main fortress area, announced itself with a bougainvillea explosion in violent pink that practically assaulted the front door. I loved it instantly.

The key was where the owner said it would be, which sounds unremarkable unless you know my history with holiday rentals. I once spent forty minutes searching for a key safe in Cornwall that turned out to be a bird box. This time, success. The door opened with that satisfying scrape of wood on stone that tells you the building has genuine age rather than manufactured character.

Inside, the place smelled of clean linen and something faintly herby, perhaps the previous guests had been cooking with the rosemary that grew in enthusiastic clumps outside the kitchen window. The living room had heavy wooden beams and furniture that looked like it had been chosen by someone with patience and taste rather than a bulk order from a catalogue. My daughter immediately claimed the window seat for reading purposes. My son discovered the terrace and the pool beyond it, and vanished.

I stood in the kitchen doorway with a cup of tea made from a travel kettle I definitely did not need to bring, given the perfectly adequate facilities, and watched my family disperse into their happy corners. The mishap with the trunks already felt like part of the holiday's texture rather than a disaster. I would buy absurdly patterned replacements from some local shop and wear them with the shamelessness of a man who has accepted his limitations.

That first evening, we walked up to the old town as the heat softened into something approaching pleasant. The fortress ruins were closing, but we peered through gates at walls that had seen Moors and Christians and countless ordinary lives in between. A tabby cat supervised our inspection with the bored authority of a local historian. We found a small bar where I attempted Spanish and the barman responded with such encouraging enthusiasm that I temporarily forgot my vocabulary limitations and ordered something I still cannot identify. It was delicious.

Walking back down in the dusk, the valley spread below us in layers of deepening blue, distant lights from other villages beginning to prick through. The children were actually talking to each other without bickering, a minor miracle attributable to fresh air and the general disarmament of being somewhere new together. My wife took my hand, perhaps forgiving the trunks, perhaps simply enjoying the moment.

I had worried this cottage break might feel too simple, too lacking in scheduled entertainment for a family used to more packaged experiences. But standing there on that ridge, with the smell of wild thyme rising from the scrubland and the comfortable weight of my daughter leaning against my arm, I understood that this was precisely the point. The pleasure was in the arriving, the settling, the small discoveries of a place that asked nothing of you but presence.

We went back to the cottage and I swam in my underwear, because of course I did, and the water was shockingly cold and wonderful, and my children howled with laughter from the terrace, and my wife took a photograph that will embarrass me at family gatherings for decades to come.