I have never been more grateful for a sat nav's patience than during our drive to Thale. We had been winding through the Harz for what felt like hours, mist clinging to the pines, me insisting I knew a shortcut, and my partner Sarah doing that slow blink she does when she is choosing between laughter and divorce. The shortcut turned out to be a logging track. A very committed logging track. We emerged at a farm where an enormous dog regarded us with the disappointment of someone who had seen this exact stupidity before. The farmer, thankfully, found it hilarious. He leaned on his gate, pointed us back toward actual tarmac, and said something in thick Saxon dialect that I am fairly sure translated to "city people."

By the time we reached the holiday home in Thale, I was ready to abandon the car and possibly my pride. The property sat tucked among trees with that particular Harz half-timbered charm, all dark beams and unexpected angles. Our host, a woman named Renate who moved with the purposeful energy of someone who had already completed several invisible tasks that morning, met us at the door. She took one look at my mud-spattered trainers and said, "Ah, you found the scenic route." No question mark. She knew.

Renate gave us the tour with the efficiency of a flight attendant demonstrating emergency exits, pausing only to shout through the window at a passing neighbour about whether his wife had recovered from her encounter with the local dumplings. The neighbour, a wiry man called Manfred, shouted back that she had not, that the dumplings had won, and that he was now eating for two. This apparently counted as normal Thale conversation.

The house itself had that satisfying creak of genuine age rather than staged rusticity. Sarah immediately claimed the bedroom with the better view, a manoeuvre she executed with the smoothness of long practice. I was too busy inspecting the kitchen, which Renate informed me had been her grandmother's, then her mother's, and now served strangers who got lost on logging tracks. She said this with evident satisfaction.

That evening we walked into Thale proper, a stroll of perhaps fifteen minutes that felt like entering a slightly theatrical village populated by people who had never considered moving anywhere else. At the pub, a man called Dieter insisted on explaining the entire history of the Bodetal gorge to us, despite our polite mentions that we planned to visit it the following day. He had opinions about the gorge. Strong opinions. He felt the tourism board did not respect its "emotional complexity." His friend at the bar, who introduced himself simply as "the other Klaus," nodded solemnly throughout, though he later confided that Dieter had never actually walked the full trail due to a lifelong feud with a particular breed of mountain goat.

We ate trout that had been swimming with considerably more optimism that morning, drank beer from a local brewery whose owner apparently refuses to distribute beyond a twenty-mile radius on principle, and listened to a heated debate about whether the Walpurgisnacht celebrations had been better in 1987 or were better now that fewer things caught fire accidentally. The consensus emerged that 1987 had superior chaos but modern times offered superior first aid.

Walking back through the dark, the Harz felt properly old in a way that British countryside rarely does to me, settled and strange and full of people who had simply stayed, generation after generation, developing strong feelings about dumplings and gorge management. Sarah took my hand, which she only does when she is feeling either genuinely affectionate or amused by my incompetence. Possibly both. The mist had returned, and somewhere in the trees I could hear what I chose to believe was an owl rather than the mountain goat Dieter feared.

I thought about Renate's grandmother's kitchen, about Manfred eating for two, about the other Klaus and his solemn nods. Travel, I decided, reaching for the obvious conclusion with the enthusiasm of a man who had drunk local beer, is not really about where you sleep. It is about who happens to be there when you arrive, muddy and ridiculous, insisting you knew exactly where you were going.