I have never been a natural navigator, and my arrival in Thale did absolutely nothing to change that reputation. We had been driving through the Harz for the best part of three hours, winding through forests that looked like they had been lifted straight from a Grimm fairy tale, and I was feeling rather pleased with myself. The sat nav had behaved, the children had only asked if we were there yet fourteen times, and I had even managed a few phrases of GCSE German at the petrol station without causing an international incident. Then I turned into what I thought was the drive for our holiday home and immediately realised I had pulled into the neighbour's garden. A very patient man in gardening trousers peered out from behind a hedge, and I reversed out with the sort of enthusiasm that suggested I did this sort of thing professionally.

The actual property, when we found it five minutes later, sat tucked into a gentle slope with timber framing that made it look like it had grown out of the hillside rather than been built on it. I had booked it partly for the views of the Bodetal valley and partly because the photographs showed a terrace where I imagined myself drinking Riesling in a statesmanlike fashion. What the photographs had not fully conveyed was the angle of that slope, which meant I spent the first ten minutes of our stay clinging to the car door and trying to unload suitcases without starting an impromptu bobsled run down to the road below.

My wife had the keys, which would have been fine had she not left them in the glove compartment. I watched her make the same slippery journey back to the car with the grim satisfaction of a man who had already made a fool of himself and welcomed the company. By the time we actually opened the door, we were all slightly breathless and I had developed a cramp in my calf that I chose to believe was altitude-related rather than a comment on my fitness.

The interior smelled of pine and something else I could not place, something clean and slightly medicinal that I later decided was probably the wood preservative. The living area opened straight onto that terrace through glass doors, and for a moment the chaos of our arrival fell away. The valley dropped away below us, thick with beech and spruce, and a hawk of some description was circling in a manner that felt almost theatrically picturesque. My son announced he needed the toilet, my daughter discovered the Wi-Fi password did not work, and the moment passed. But I caught it, and I held onto it.

The kitchen was compact in that efficient German way, everything within arm's reach and nothing decorative without purpose. I made tea with the sort of kettle that boils with alarming speed and found mugs in a cupboard that opened the wrong direction, banging my elbow and saying something unprintable. My wife laughed, not unkindly, and I was reminded that this was why we did these things. Not for the seamless holiday experience, which exists only in brochures, but for the small humiliations that become stories, and the unexpected moments of beauty that catch you between them.

By evening we had established a sort of operational rhythm. The Wi-Fi sorted itself, as these things mysteriously do. I had been to the small supermarket in Thale and bought bread that was genuinely crusty and beer that was genuinely cold. We sat on that terrace as the light faded, wrapped in blankets because I had underestimated how quickly the temperature drops in the Harz once the sun disappears. The valley below us turned from green to grey to a darkness broken only by the distant lights of other houses and the occasional passing car on a road we could hear but not see.

I thought about the neighbour I had inconvenienced, and wondered if he was telling his wife about the Englishman who could not read a house number. I thought about my GCSE German, and how little of it had survived thirty years. Mostly I thought about how glad I was to be there, cramp and all, in a place that demanded nothing except that you show up and pay attention. The hawk had gone, but the valley remained, and we had a week to learn its moods. I finished my beer and went inside to argue with my son about shower schedules, already looking forward to whatever tomorrow's small disaster might bring.