I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I packed the car at half past six in the morning and immediately shut my own hand in the boot. There I was, hopping about on the driveway, silently screaming so I didn't wake the neighbours, while my youngest helpfully asked if this meant we weren't going to see the witches. Because yes, of course we were going to see the witches. Thale is basically witch central. You cannot move for witches in the Harz.

The drive from Calais was long but mercifully uneventful, save for one spectacular argument about whether German motorways genuinely have no speed limit or whether I was just making that up to justify my driving. We rolled into Thale proper in the late afternoon, and I immediately felt that lovely shift you get when you leave proper roads behind and start winding up into proper hills. The Harz has that quality of suddenly making you feel like you've wandered into a slightly more dramatic version of reality. Steep forests, odd rock formations, the whole Brothers Grimm aesthetic.

Finding the cottage was straightforward enough, though I did manage to reverse into a very dignified three-point turn that became a seven-point turn when I realised the sat nav had brought us to what was definitely someone's private drive and not our holiday home. A helpful local walking his dog watched the entire performance with the patient expression of a man who has seen many British drivers do exactly this.

The cottage itself sits in that lovely sweet spot of being properly in the countryside without feeling utterly isolated. You can see other houses, but they're not on top of you. There's a garden, which my children treated as an immediate expedition site, and I stood there with a cup of tea that I hadn't actually made yet, just holding an empty mug and breathing in that particular smell of pine and damp earth and somewhere, faintly, someone's wood smoke. The kind of smell that makes you feel you've been clever about your life choices, at least temporarily.

Inside, it had that comfortable, slightly chaotic energy of a place that's been thoroughly lived in by many families before you. Nothing fancy, nothing trying too hard. Just solid, practical furniture and enough space that we weren't immediately on top of each other. My daughter discovered the sofa bed within approximately forty seconds and declared it her new permanent residence. My son was more interested in whether the WiFi could handle Minecraft, which I suppose is a valid first impression too.

I had one of those moments that evening, standing at the kitchen window watching the light fade behind the trees, where I felt properly away from everything. Not in a dramatic escaping-the-rat-race way, just that gentle realisation that nobody knew exactly where I was, nobody needed anything from me for a bit, and the biggest decision facing me was whether to open the Riesling now or after the children were properly asleep. I opened it during the bath-time negotiations, which felt like the correct adult compromise.

The first night, we slept with the windows open, which meant waking to birdsong and also to my husband's complaint that a bird had definitely looked at him in a judgmental way. We had no particular plan for the morning beyond breakfast and a vague wander towards the Bode Gorge, because when you're in Thale, you sort of have to start with the dramatic landscape before you do anything else. But that first evening, that first slow settling in, was exactly what I'd hoped for. Slightly chaotic, entirely unpretentious, and already full of small, ridiculous memories.