I have always believed that a proper holiday should begin with a small disaster, if only to give you something to laugh about later. Our trip to Bamberg in Upper Franconia delivered on this front before we had even collected the keys.

The sat-nav had been chirping confidently in German for the better part of three hours, guiding us through increasingly pretty Bavarian countryside. Rolling hills, patchwork fields, the occasional church spire poking above the trees. My partner was driving, I was navigating, and together we made the classic mistake of assuming we knew better than the machine. "That cannot be right," I said, pointing at a narrow farm track that the sat-nav seemed to fancy. "It looks like a footpath." My partner, who possesses that peculiar British certainty about these things, pressed on regardless. Ten minutes later we were reversing half a mile back down a muddy lane, pursued by an irate goose who had taken personal offence at our presence. I have never felt less dignified. We arrived at the holiday home with mud on the bumper and our pride thoroughly dented.

The property itself was a proper Franconian gem, all timber framing and sensible German efficiency inside. But I am getting ahead of myself, because the weather had already begun its campaign of disruption. We had packed for walking, you see. Proper walking boots, waterproofs, the Ordnance Survey mentality of covering ground and ticking off views. The first morning dawned bright and almost insultingly cheerful, so we set off with optimism towards the Michaelsberg Abbey, that imposing Benedictine monastery perched above the town. The path wound through vineyards, the Regnitz valley spreading below us, and for perhaps forty minutes I allowed myself to believe we had brought the right weather with us from Britain.

Then the sky turned the colour of a bad mood.

The rain came horizontally, as rain does when it wishes to make a point. We sheltered under a wayside shrine to Saint Nepomuk, huddled together like the drenched idiots we were, while my partner delivered a lecture on the foolishness of trusting Bavarian weather in October. I could not argue. We squelched back down, abandoned our plans for the Altenburg hike, and spent the afternoon drying socks on the holiday home's radiators while drinking rather excellent Franconian wine. The Germans, I reflected, know how to build a radiator. Ours at home in Sheffield would not dry a teatowel.

The following days became an elaborate dance with the elements. We developed a system of weather apps, window-checking, and hopeful interpretation of cloud formations that would have shamed a meteorological office. Tuesday promised three hours of relative dryness, so we bolted for the Franconian Switzerland path along the Regnitz, that peculiar landscape of limestone cliffs and half-hidden caves. We made it to the first viewpoint before the drizzle resumed, persistent as a bore at a party. Still, there is something about walking in light rain through autumn woodland, the smell of damp earth and rotting leaves, that feels properly alive. We pressed on to Seehof Palace, arriving soaked but smug, and toured the rococo gardens in weather that the original bishops surely never endured.

By Thursday we had abandoned any pretence of planning. The forecast showed a solid block of grey, so we simply walked anyway, following the Bamberg city walls in waterproofs that gradually surrendered to the persistent wet. We found ourselves in Geyerswoerth Palace gardens, then along the river to Little Venice, those fishermen's houses lining the canals, looking for all the world like a scene that deserved better weather. A local dog walker took pity on our bedraggled state and directed us to a bakery where we ate warm pretzels and accepted our defeat with buttery grace.

The thing about British walkers, I realised, sitting in that bakery with steam rising from my jacket, is that we are permanently prepared for disappointment. The Bavarians seemed to treat rain as a minor inconvenience, something to be noted and ignored. We treated it as a personal challenge, a test of character developed through decades of damp Peak District weekends. There was something almost comforting in the failure of our plans, in the necessity of adaptation, in finding the brewery museum instead of the mountaintop view.

Our final morning brought the only proper sunshine of the week, and we walked the Michaelsberg path again in golden light that made a mockery of our earlier suffering. The abbey, the vineyards, the whole ridiculous panorama spread before us. We took photographs that looked like postcards and felt slightly fraudulent doing so.

I would not change that week, not the goose, not the horizontal rain, not the radiator-dried socks. Walking in uncertain weather strips a place down to its essentials. You notice the shelter of beech woods, the sudden warmth of a bakery, the particular green of moss on limestone when everything is wet. Bamberg gave us its proper self, not the polished version for fair-weather visitors. We earned our blisters and our pretzels both, and I suspect that is rather the point.