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It was a last-minute May half-term break. We knew the cottage, lent to us by a relative, would be a squeeze for my husband, three teenage daughters and me. “But hey,” I told my unconvinced gang, “it’s near the beach – we’ll hardly be inside anyway.”

One daughter had a party the night before; she promised to be home by midnight, and we agreed we would begin the six-hour drive at 9am. Said daughter arrived back as I was making my morning tea. She was still drunk, and she had lost her phone.

Much Facebook messaging later, it transpired the phone had been taken by a friend to someone else’s house; but no one was sure which friend, or which house, and everyone who had been at the party was now comatose (including our daughter). My husband, a control freak whose mantra that morning was something like, “When I say we’re leaving at 9am, I mean we’re leaving at 9am”, was now pacing the kitchen saying this holiday had always been a terrible idea. We had no inkling then how much worse it would get.

Around noon we set off, having agreed an hour-long detour to the house where the missing phone might be. En route, partygirl daughter was sick out of a back window. My husband swerved the car angrily into a side road and I raced to the corner shop for bottles of water to clear up the mess. A young couple pushing their perfect baby down the road threw horrified looks. “Don’t worry,” I shouted, “this will be your life one day.” They averted their eyes and hurried away.

We arrived at the phone house, parked outside, and watched as partygirl daughter swayed unsteadily up the garden path. “She’s still drunk,” said my husband. As the front door opened, my daughter was sick on the doorstep. My husband slunk down below the driving wheel. “You deal with it,” he said.

An hour later, having mopped up, we were on our way again. Five hours behind schedule we joined the motorway, where the cars were virtually stationary. My husband, incandescent, said absolutely nothing. Everyone was starving, but no one dared suggest we should stop for lunch.

By early evening we were in Cornwall, but the cottage was near Land’s End, so we still had a way to go. “It won’t be long now,” I called merrily from the front. Moments later, the car spluttered to a stop. We ended up in a crowded pub garden at 10pm waiting for the AA, which took an hour to get the car going again.

It was after midnight when we arrived at the cottage, and despite everyone’s relief it was immediately clear it was much too small. My protestations that we would be at the beach anyway evaporated when we awoke next morning to thick fog and driving rain. By mid-morning everyone wanted to be elsewhere, a situation I hoped to improve by taking my husband to the pub for a drink. There, we had a massive row, and he stormed back to the cottage to book a flight home. Partygirl daughter, who had realised the recovered phone was in fact broken, begged him to take her with him.

We dropped them at Newquay airport the next morning, and the other girls and I went to a cafe. As we watched their plane take off, the clouds parted and the sun appeared. “The beach!” we shouted. We raced back; every day after that was sunny, and the cottage was now the perfect size. The three of us have returned many times since; my husband and our other daughter have never been back.