I have never been so relieved to see a gravel driveway in all my life. Three hours from Caen, two wrong turns, one heated debate about whether I had actually downloaded the offline maps, and there we were: Saint-Germain-sur-Ay, a tiny dot on the Cotentin coast that I had confidently assured my partner was "impossible to miss." Reader, we missed it twice.

The final indignity came at a village roundabout no bigger than a dinner table. I took the exit too sharply, clipped a wheel on the curb, and sent an entire bag of wine gums flying across the dashboard. My partner picked one off my collar in silence. "Romantic," I said. She did not reply.

But then the gite appeared, and suddenly the wine gums mattered not at all. A proper stone cottage with shutters that actually shut, tucked behind a windbreak of trees that looked as though they had been arguing with the Channel winds for decades. The key was exactly where the owner said: under a flowerpot that contained, rather brilliantly, a plastic frog wearing a rain hat. I liked this place immediately.

We dumped our bags and did what any sensible British person does after four hours in a car: we decided to walk immediately, weather be damned. The forecast had promised "sunny intervals," which in my experience means you will see the sun for approximately one interval, then intervals of everything else. Still, we set off toward the coast path with the determined optimism of people who had packed one rain jacket between two of us.

The first mile was glorious. Proper Normandy farmland, hedgerows thick with blackberries, the occasional cow giving us that look cows have perfected over centuries of watching humans make poor decisions. You could smell the sea before you saw it, that sharp salt edge cutting through the warmer smells of grass and manure. My partner, who had been maintaining dignified silence since the wine gum incident, actually took my hand. Forgiveness was in the air, along with something that felt suspiciously like approaching drizzle.

We reached the dunes just as the "sunny interval" concluded its business. The sky turned the colour of a poorly washed sock, and the wind arrived with what I can only describe as personal animosity. Within minutes, horizontal rain was filling my ears. My partner, who had sensibly claimed the rain jacket, watched me with the expression of someone who had predicted exactly this outcome but had chosen not to gloat.

We squelched back through lanes that had transformed into streams, passing a farmhouse where an elderly man stood in his doorway smoking, entirely dry, watching us with the satisfied detachment of someone who had checked the proper forecast. I waved. He nodded, once, as if to say: foreigners.

By the time we reached the cottage, I could have wrung water from my socks into a bucket. The plastic frog in its rain hat suddenly seemed less whimsical and more like sound practical advice. We spent the evening drying clothes on every available radiator, drinking the cider we had meant to save, and laughing at the sheer Britishness of our determination to walk in weather that any reasonable local had clearly avoided.

The next morning, grey but dry, we tried again. This time with both jackets, actual waterproof boots, and a humility the previous day's soaking had earned us. The same path, the same dunes, but now the light was different, silver and shifting, the sea churning with whitecaps that made the whole landscape feel alive and slightly cross. We walked for hours, collecting shells, getting our boots muddy in the salt marshes, watching oystercatchers work the shoreline with the focused intensity of birds who had never once misjudged a weather forecast.

That evening, dry and pleasantly exhausted, we sat by the cottage window with cheese and bread and the last of the cider. The rain returned, tapping against the glass like an old friend who knew they were welcome. I thought about the walk, the getting lost, the wine gums, the soaking. The whole slightly chaotic business of arriving somewhere new and letting it teach you its rhythms.

Some holidays give you perfect weather and smooth sailing. Others give you a plastic frog in a rain hat and the kind of damp epiphany that only comes from stubbornly walking through a Normandy downpour. I know which kind I prefer.