I have never been so relieved to see a set of house keys in a plastic lockbox as I was last Thursday afternoon, standing in a car park just outside Thale with a boot full of shopping bags and a sat nav that had apparently decided to retire without notice.

The journey up from Calais had been mostly fine, if you discount the three-hour stretch where my partner insisted we take what he called a "scenic shortcut" through Lower Saxony. It turned out to be scenic in the sense that we saw a great deal of identical farmland and one very startled goat. By the time we reached the Harz region, I was ready for mountains, forests, and perhaps a small glass of something restorative.

What I was not ready for was the final approach to our holiday cottage. The directions from the rental company mentioned a "gentle incline." I have since decided that Germans and the English have fundamentally different relationships with the word gentle. We crawled up a track that felt more suited to mountain goats than a Vauxhall Corsa with slightly dodgy suspension. My partner gripped the steering wheel with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb. I gripped the passenger door handle and made small whimpering noises.

Then came the mishap. We arrived at the property, exhausted and triumphant, only to discover that I had written the key code in my phone's notes app under "Harz 2024" but had somehow managed to save it as "Haz 2024" in a completely different folder. Twenty minutes of increasingly frantic scrolling followed, punctuated by me muttering that technology was a curse and my partner helpfully pointing out that alphabetical organisation was not exactly my strong suit. I eventually found it buried between a shopping list from March and a photo of a cat that is not ours.

The cottage itself, when we finally staggered inside, was an immediate balm to our frayed nerves. It sits in a proper wooded spot, the kind where you half expect a friendly witch to pop out from behind a pine tree. The living area has these enormous windows that let in the green light of the forest, and I stood there for a good minute just breathing in that particular smell of old wood and fresh air that you never quite get in our terraced house back in Sheffield.

I will admit that my first act was not to admire the tasteful decor or the well-equipped kitchen. It was to locate the sofa and collapse onto it with the grace of a sack of potatoes. My partner, ever the practical one, immediately began investigating the terrace and the barbecue area, returning to report that we had a view of actual proper hills and that he had already spotted a squirrel having what he described as "a bit of a moment" with a pine cone.

The kitchen, when I eventually bothered to look properly, turned out to be one of those German ones that makes you feel slightly inadequate about your own cooking abilities. Everything had a place. Everything worked. There was even a coffee machine that looked like it required a degree in engineering, which my partner immediately began fiddling with while I explored the bedrooms upstairs.

We are not difficult people to please, generally speaking. But there is something about arriving somewhere after a long drive, after a sat nav rebellion, after a key code crisis, and finding that the beds are actually comfortable and the shower produces hot water without elaborate negotiation. I stood under that shower later that evening and felt the tension of the journey actually leave my shoulders.

Dinner that first night was not the romantic local meal we had imagined. It was cheese on toast made with bread from the service station and a bottle of Riesling that had survived the journey by pure chance. We ate on the little terrace, wrapped in blankets because I had drastically underestimated how chilly the Harz evenings get even in late spring, and watched the light fade through the trees.

My partner, mouth full of slightly disappointing cheese, declared this was already his favourite holiday ever. I pointed out that we had been there approximately ninety minutes and had accomplished almost nothing. He said that was precisely why. I think he may have a point.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of actual silence, broken only by some enthusiastic owl somewhere in the woods, and woke to mist curling through the trees and the realisation that I had packed three jumpers and no socks. Some things, it seems, do not change regardless of how picturesque the surroundings.

We have days ahead of us for hiking the trails and exploring Thale proper and perhaps figuring out that coffee machine. But that first evening, slightly chaotic and deeply imperfect, already feels like the bit I will remember most fondly.