We had been on the road for what felt like six hours but was probably closer to three when I finally admitted, with the sort of quiet dignity that only comes after eating an entire bag of Haribo in one sitting, that I had absolutely no idea where our sat nav was taking us. The A10 out of Berlin had been straightforward enough, but somewhere around Wandlitz the countryside had swallowed us whole. Fields of rapeseed glowed an almost aggressive yellow in the afternoon sun. My wife sat beside me with that particular expression she saves for when I have made a decision and she is politely waiting for me to discover it was a bad one.

"Zerpenschleuse," I kept saying, as if repetition might conjure the place into existence. "It is a real place. I checked."

"You checked," she repeated, which in fifteen years of marriage I have learned is not actually agreement.

The sat nav, for its part, had developed what I can only describe as a personality disorder. It kept insisting we turn onto roads that appeared to be tracks, then tracks that appeared to be someone's driveway, then someone's driveway that appeared to be a field. The children had fallen into that peculiar silence of the car-trapped, occasionally emitting small whimpers about needing the loo and whether Germany had McDonald's in the wilderness.

Then suddenly, gloriously, a sign. Zerpenschleuse, population I did not care to read, and beneath it the little arrow for our holiday home. We bumped down a lane lined with birch trees, the sort of lane that makes you immediately concerned about your paintwork, and emerged into a clearing where a wooden house sat looking terribly pleased with itself.

I will be honest. My first thought was that we had accidentally arrived at a very nice shed.

But oh, what a shed. The key was in the lockbox exactly as promised, and stepping inside was like walking into one of those Pinterest boards my wife keeps that I pretend not to look at. Exposed beams, a wood-burning stove that looked as though it had never known the indignity of actual use, and windows that framed the garden like paintings. The garden itself sloped down towards a small pond, beyond which lay nothing but trees and the particular hush of proper countryside.

I immediately decided I loved it. This is my pattern with holidays. I resist, I worry, I eat too many sweets in the car, and then I arrive and become embarrassingly enthusiastic.

The mishap, because there is always a mishap, came when I attempted to demonstrate my competence by lighting the stove. I have lit stoves before. I am a man in my forties who owns a barbecue. How difficult could it be? Forty-five minutes later, the children had given up watching and were exploring the bedrooms, my wife had opened wine with the air of someone who knew this would happen, and I was on my knees before a smoking metal box, reading German instructions with the desperate intensity of a final exam student.

"Perhaps," my wife said eventually, "we just use the central heating."

I agreed, but not before I had established that the stove worked perfectly once one opened the flue. A small detail. A detail I had missed. A detail that I will not be allowed to forget.

By evening, though, with the actual heating doing its job and the children finally asleep after the sort of overexcited bedtime that involves a lot of whispered negotiation, we sat at the wooden table with our wine and the windows open to the cooling air. Somewhere an owl made that ridiculous noise owls make. The pond caught the last light. My wife reached across and squeezed my hand, which I understood to mean both that she forgave me the stove and that she was glad we had come.

And I was glad too. Glad of the wrong turns and the Haribo and the shed that turned out to be rather beautiful. Glad of the nothing we had planned, the walks we might take through the surrounding woods, the lazy mornings with coffee on the terrace, the possibility of renting a canoe if we could be bothered to find the lake. That is the thing about these places, I think. They do not demand anything of you. They simply wait, patient and wooden, while you slow down enough to notice them.

I went to bed that night in a loft bedroom with slanted ceilings that required a certain tactical approach to dressing, listening to my youngest mutter in her sleep and my wife's familiar breathing. The stove sat dark and unlit below, a silent witness to my hubris. I did not mind. Tomorrow, I decided, I would try again. And this time, I would definitely remember the flue.