Getting to Bredene was supposed to be straightforward, which is of course exactly when the universe decides to have a laugh at your expense. I'd programmed the sat nav with what I thought was our holiday home address, settled into that peculiarly British ritual of over-packing the car for a Belgian beach trip, and set off from Calais feeling terribly organised. Three hours later, I found myself in a supermarket car park in Ostend, staring at a sign for frozen prawns and wondering where my dignity had gone. Turns out I'd punched in the postcode for a branch of Colruyt rather than our actual accommodation. My partner sat in the passenger seat eating the emergency biscuits and trying very hard not to look smug.

We eventually found the right road, a quiet lane just back from the Bredene seafront, and pulled up to what the website had modestly called a "holiday home" but what I immediately wanted to call something far more grand. It was one of those proper Flemish coastal houses, all whitewashed brick and sensible shutters, with a garden that had clearly been loved by someone with more patience for pruning than I'll ever possess. The key was in the lockbox as promised, though getting it out required the dexterity of a safecracker and the language skills of someone who'd definitely failed GCSE French. Belgian lockboxes, I discovered, have opinions.

The first thing that struck me, once I'd stopped flapping about keys and luggage, was the absolute hush. Not silence exactly - there was birdsong, distant bicycle bells, someone somewhere mowing a lawn with characteristic Flemish efficiency - but the particular quiet of a place that isn't trying to impress anyone. Bredene doesn't do dramatic. It does comfortable. It does "oh, you've arrived, here's a cup of coffee and a view of the garden." I stood in the kitchen, which was spotless in that slightly intimidating Belgian way, and felt my shoulders actually drop for the first time in months.

We'd planned to head straight to the beach, being proper holidaymakers with an itinerary. Instead, we got lost. Properly, gloriously lost, within about ten minutes of leaving the house. I'd taken what looked like a shortcut down a sandy path between two dunes, reasoning that the sea was that way and how hard could it be? Very hard, apparently. The path forked, then forked again, and before I knew it we were wandering through what I can only describe as someone's private allotment empire. Rows of cabbages nodded at us in the breeze. A man in a flat cap looked up from his beans with the resigned expression of someone who'd seen this before.

Here's the thing about getting lost in Flanders, though - you're never actually lost for long, and you always find something better than what you were looking for. We stumbled out onto a tiny lane, then another, and suddenly there was a cafe that didn't appear on any map I'd studied. It had three tables outside, plastic chairs in that particular shade of green that only exists in continental Europe, and a woman who brought us coffee without being asked because clearly we looked like we needed it. We sat there for an hour, watching an elderly gent cycle past with a baguette sticking out of his basket like a flag of surrender, and I realised I couldn't remember the last time I'd done absolutely nothing without feeling guilty about it.

The beach found us eventually, as these things do when you stop trying so hard. It was smaller than the main Bredene stretch, more pebbly, with fishing boats pulled up at improbable angles and a smell of seaweed and diesel that shouldn't work together but absolutely does. I paddled in water that was roughly the temperature of my disappointment, laughed about it anyway, and thought how strange it is that the best moments of a holiday are always the ones you didn't schedule.

That evening, back at the house, I cooked badly with ingredients from a corner shop I'd never have found without my earlier navigational incompetence. We ate outside as the light went that particular Flemish grey-pink, and I understood something about holidays I'd always known but kept forgetting - that getting lost isn't a failure of planning, it's the whole point of going somewhere new in the first place.