I have never been particularly gifted at reading German train timetables, a fact that became embarrassingly clear somewhere between Berlin Hauptbahnhof and the middle of nowhere. There I stood, rucksack on back, watching my actual train pull away from a platform three minutes earlier than my brain had computed. The next service to Zerpenschleuse was not for two hours. I found a bench, ate an entire packet of Haribo in shame, and reflected on how my Yorkshire grandmother always said punctuality was a virtue. She would have been appalled.

When I finally arrived at the holiday home, a converted forester's lodge with timber framing that looked like something from a Grimms' fairy tale, I was determined to walk off my sugary stupor. The owner had left a charming hand-drawn map of local paths, with helpful annotations like "duck pond, aggressive drake" and "here, good mushrooms in autumn." I laced my boots, checked the sky - a promising blue with wispy clouds - and set off toward the Finow Canal.

Brandenburg flatness is a particular kind of flatness. Not the tedious flatness of motorway verges, but a generous, open flatness that lets you see weather coming from what feels like East Prussia. I had not gone two miles along the towpath before I noticed a darkening in the northwest. Still, British optimism dies hard. I had left my waterproof in the lodge. "Probably just a shower," I told a passing cyclist, who looked at me with the pity Germans reserve for the obviously deluded.

The rain arrived with theatrical timing. Not English drizzle, not Scottish mist, but proper Central European precipitation that soaked through my supposedly breathable jacket in four minutes flat. I squelched into a stand of birch trees and stood there like a disappointed heron, watching the canal turn into a thousand tiny drum skins. A kingfisher flashed past, clearly unbothered, and I felt a familiar holiday feeling: the particular comedy of being entirely unprepared in a foreign landscape.

The walk back was an exercise in British stoicism and German efficiency. I passed a farm where an elderly woman was calmly hanging laundry in the downpour, securing each peg with the precision of someone who had never once misread a timetable. She nodded at me. I nodded back, water streaming from my nose, and we shared a moment of mutual acknowledgment that weather is merely weather.

The following morning brought fog so thick I could barely locate the duck pond, let alone its aggressive drake. I had planned a longer circuit toward the Wandlitzsee, but visibility suggested this would end with me walking into a canal. Instead I took the shorter woodland path directly behind the property, where the mist transformed ordinary pine trees into something rather mystical. Every fifty metres I would startle a pheasant, which would explode upward with a sound like a Victorian gentleman expressing surprise. My heart rate remained elevated throughout.

By afternoon the sun had burned through, and I found myself overdressed and sweating profusely on the same towpath I had abandoned the previous day. This is the essential truth of walking in Brandenburg, I decided: you pack for four seasons and experience them all before lunch. I sat on a lock gate, boots off, drying my socks in a manner that would have scandalised my grandmother, and watched a narrowboat negotiate the chamber with agonising slowness. The skipper raised his coffee mug in salute.

On my final morning I attempted the Wandlitzsee circuit properly, starting early to beat whatever meteorological chaos the afternoon might bring. The path wound through mixed forest, past a small lake where someone had constructed an elaborate wooden swimming platform, and finally emerged at the lake itself. I found a bench, ate the remaining Haribo, and considered how my failed train connection had begun something rather wonderful. The water was perfectly still. Somewhere, I knew, rain was gathering over East Prussia, preparing its approach. I did not care. I had my waterproof now, permanently packed, and the particular wisdom of someone who had learned that being slightly ridiculous is often the best way to experience a place properly.