I should have known the Harz would have the last laugh when I packed three pairs of shorts and one battered cagoule for a walking holiday in early autumn. The satnav had already tried to send me down what looked like a forestry track outside Thale, and I'd done that very British thing of confidently ignoring it until the tarmac genuinely ran out, at which point I performed a twelve-point turn while a local dog walker watched with the patient amusement of someone who sees this weekly.

The property sat where the valley opens up, all timber framing and sensible German efficiency, with a balcony that promised mountain views and morning coffee. I dumped my optimistic luggage and did what any sensible Brit abroad does first: checked the weather app with growing despair. Sunshine, cloud, rain, and something called "Brocken mist" all within forty-eight hours. I laced up my boots anyway, because that's the point of a walking holiday, isn't it? You walk.

The trail up toward the Bodetal gorge started promisingly, proper woodland paths with that particular autumn smell of damp leaf mulch and woodsmoke from somewhere distant. I passed the Hexentanzplatz, the witches' dancing ground, which felt appropriately atmospheric given the clouds gathering with theatrical timing. Within the hour I was pulling on that single cagoule while the first proper rain in weeks arrived with what I can only describe as German thoroughness. No British drizzle this. Vertical, determined, almost punctual.

I squelched back to the flat, passing the chairlift station where sensible people were riding above it all, and spent the evening steaming gently in front of the television with a bottle of Rotspon from the supermarket in Thale, watching the weather radar like it was a thriller I couldn't switch off.

The next morning brought that peculiar mountain clarity after rain, everything sharp-edged and vivid, the kind of morning that makes you forgive everything. I set off toward the Selke valley with actual sandwiches and renewed optimism. The path followed the river through beech woods still clinging to their colour, and for three hours I had that rare, almost smug feeling of getting it right. The boots were finally earning their keep. I even took photographs without immediate regret.

The Brocken mist caught me on the return, though. Not rain this time, but a sudden grey wall that dropped visibility to perhaps twenty metres, turning familiar-looking woodland into something stranger. I stood there with my phone map and that particular foolishness of the moderately lost, realising I'd been following what I thought was the main path but had somehow drifted onto a logging track. Twenty minutes of increasingly brisk walking in what I hoped was the right direction, accompanied by some muttering and the distinct sense that the Harz was quietly teaching me something about humility.

I emerged eventually above Thale, the mist breaking just enough to show the town below, and stood there damp, slightly chilled, and unexpectedly content. That's the thing about walking holidays, I suppose. The weather does what it does. Your plans adjust or they don't. I'd come expecting postcard views and managed something more honest: the feel of proper boots on proper paths, the particular silence of fog in old forest, the small victory of finding your way back to somewhere with heating and a kettle.

The cagoule got hung up to dry. The shorts stayed in the case, unloved and unneeded. I made tea and watched the mist roll through the valley, already plotting which route to attempt tomorrow, weather permitting, or perhaps weather defying. Some habits, apparently, survive even the most pointed meteorological hints.