I have never been so grateful for a pair of wellies in all my life, and I say that as someone who once wore flip-flops to a wedding in Cumbria. The journey to our little holiday home in Nysted, down on the Danish island of Lolland, had been going almost suspiciously well until we reached the final stretch. My partner was navigating, I was driving, and somewhere between Sakskobing and Nysted itself, we managed to miss a turning so completely that we ended up down a farm track staring at a very unimpressed herd of cattle. The sat nav had given up on us entirely. We reversed for what felt like half a mile, me sweating profusely, my partner making helpful comments like "there's a bit more room on the left" when there absolutely was not.

By the time we found the proper road and pulled up to the traditional Danish house, I was ready to collapse onto anything horizontal. But stepping out of the car, the first thing that hit me was the silence. Not the awkward, heavy sort, but the proper countryside stillness broken only by distant birdsong and what I later learned was the gentle lapping of water from Nysted Nor, the shallow bay that sits right on the doorstep of this little coastal settlement.

The house itself was charming in that unpretentious Scandinavian way, all clean lines and practical design, with a garden that seemed to stretch towards the water. We dumped our bags with the reckless enthusiasm of people who had been in a car for far too long and immediately decided, against all better judgment, to go for a walk. The weather was doing that thing it does, the thing British weather does even when you have technically left Britain, where the sky looks vaguely threatening but also sort of promising, and you convince yourself it will probably hold.

It did not hold.

We had been walking perhaps twenty minutes along the coastal path, heading towards the harbour area, when the heavens opened with what I can only describe as theatrical commitment. The rain came sideways. My so-called waterproof jacket proved itself to be water-resistant in the same way that a sieve is resistant to holding water. We squelched back to the house, me laughing like a maniac, my partner doing that tight-lipped smile that means someone will be mentioned in the divorce papers.

The next morning dawned grey but dry, and we were determined not to be defeated. We set off again, this time properly booted and coated, walking the trail that runs along Nysted Nor towards the open coast. The landscape here is flat, almost startlingly so after the hills of home, and there is something hypnotic about the way the reeds move in the wind and the light plays across the shallow water. We spotted herons standing motionless, looking deeply judgmental about our dripping presence, and passed through patches of woodland where the autumn leaves were just beginning to turn.

The weather continued its game of cat and mouse. One moment pale sunshine, the next a spiteful shower that sent us hurrying for the inadequate shelter of wind-bent trees. By day three, I had developed what I can only describe as a weather-based anxiety, checking the sky every few minutes like some kind of amateur meteorologist with no qualifications and even less success at prediction.

We attempted a longer walk towards the southern edge of Nysted, following paths through agricultural land and along drainage channels that speak to the engineered nature of this low-lying landscape. The Danes, it turns out, are serious about their walking infrastructure, and the well-marked routes made navigation simple even as the weather did its best to confuse and demoralise. At one point, caught in yet another downpour, we sheltered in a small copse and ate soggy sandwiches while discussing whether we were actually enjoying ourselves or merely enduring a particularly scenic form of punishment.

I think it was that moment, damp and slightly ridiculous, when I realised something about myself. I am not good at sitting still on holiday. I need to be moving, doing, proving that I have extracted maximum value from every waking hour. The weather was forcing me to slow down, to accept that a walk cut short by rain was not a failure but simply a different experience. When we finally retreated to the house that afternoon, built a fire, and sat with books and the sound of rain against the windows, I felt something shift. The holiday was not the walks. The holiday was the whole thing, the mishaps and the dry socks and the quiet evenings.

On our final day, the weather gifted us a miracle. We woke to actual blue sky, actual sunshine, actual conditions that would not require emergency poncho deployment. We walked the full coastal circuit we had been attempting for days, out past the marina where small boats sat quietly in their moorings, along the shore where the Baltic stretched flat and silver to the horizon. The flatness of Lolland, which had initially seemed almost featureless, revealed itself as something else entirely, a landscape of subtle textures and vast skies where every shift of weather wrote a different scene across the water and reeds.

I stood on a small rise, finally dry for what felt like the first time in a week, and watched a flock of birds rise from the marsh in a coordinated burst of movement that looked almost rehearsed. My partner, who had forgiven me for the cattle track incident somewhere around day two, stood beside me in companionable silence.

We walked back slowly, making the most of our weather reprieve, already joking about which bits we would remember most fondly. It would not be the sunny final day, I suspected, but the soggy sandwiches and the reversing and the particular quality of light through rainclouds over Danish water. Some holidays give you what you expect. Others, like our walking adventure in Nysted, give you what you need, even when you spend half of them absolutely soaking wet.