We'd only just pulled into the little lane behind Luxury Beach Stay when the satnav cheerfully announced we'd arrived, right as I managed to wedge the hire car between two wheelie bins and a low stone wall. The boot wouldn't open without a three-point turn that scraped the bumper, and by the time we'd wrestled the cool bags free I was already laughing at myself for packing enough food for a fortnight when we'd only booked three nights.

The cottage sat just a short stroll from the dunes, and the first thing that hit me was the smell of salt and frying onions drifting from somewhere nearby. We dumped the bags, flicked the hot-tub cover open to check it was heating, then set straight off again in search of supper. A ten-minute walk along the lane brought us to a tidy little pub with picnic tables outside; inside, the specials board promised cockles with laverbread and a Welsh rarebit that sounded far too good to ignore. We ordered both, plus a couple of pints of the local ale, and sat watching the light fade over the estuary while the food arrived steaming and generous.

Next morning the plan had been a proper fry-up in the cottage kitchen, but the market in the nearby village was already setting up when we wandered past, so we bought fresh cockles, a crusty loaf, and some sharp local cheese instead. Back at Luxury Beach Stay we spread everything on the little table by the window, brewed tea strong enough to stand a spoon in, and ate with the doors open so the sound of the waves drifted in. It felt almost civilised until I tried to warm the cockles in a pan and managed to over-salt them; we ended up laughing into our mugs and scraping the cheese onto toast instead.

By the afternoon we'd decided the hot tub could wait and headed back out for an early dinner at another little place that served bowls of cawl with big doorstop slices of bread. The broth was thick with lamb and root veg, exactly the sort of thing you want when the breeze off the water turns cool. We lingered over coffee, then ambled home with a paper bag of Welsh cakes for later.

That evening we made a half-hearted attempt at cooking the sausages we'd brought, but the oven in the cottage ran hotter than expected and they came out more charred than golden. We rescued them with a dollop of mustard from the market stall and ate them straight from the grill tray, perched on the edge of the hot tub while the stars came out. Sitting there with salt on my fingers and a slightly burnt sausage in hand, it struck me how often our best meals on holiday end up being the ones that go slightly wrong. The cottage itself stayed quietly in the background, a cosy spot to return to after each small food adventure, and by the time we turned in I realised the mishap with the car on arrival had set the tone perfectly: nothing had gone quite to plan, yet everything tasted better for it.