I'd packed the car with military precision, or so I thought. Satnav programmed, snacks within reach, and a playlist that swung from Britpop to questionable Eurodance. What I had not accounted for was my own spectacular talent for leaving the actual house keys on the kitchen table in Manchester. Discovered this gem of information precisely forty minutes into a six-hour drive to the Harz. Cue a frantic turnaround, a sheepish confession to my partner, and a departure time that meant we hit the Autobahn at the exact moment every lorry driver in Germany decided to overtake his mate at forty-seven kilometres per hour.

We rolled into Thale just as the light was doing that golden, forgiving thing it does at the end of long afternoons. The town sits in a valley where the Bode River has carved its way through limestone cliffs, and the whole place feels slightly tucked away from the modern world, like someone forgot to tell it about smartphones and twenty-four-hour supermarkets. Our holiday home was one of those solid, unhurried buildings that Germans do so well, all sensible angles and a garden that suggested decades of someone caring about rhododendrons.

The key, mercifully, was exactly where the property manager said it would be. I have never been so pleased to see a small metal object in my life.

But the real magic of that first evening came from the people. We'd nipped to a bakery on the Hauptstrasse for emergency provisions, and there encountered Herr Brandt, a gentleman of approximately seventy-five who operated the till with the leisurely pace of a man who has never once considered that life might be rushing past him. He examined my attempt at German with the patient expression of a primary school teacher, then switched to English that was somehow both flawless and heavily accented, a trick I still cannot explain. "You are here for the walking," he announced, rather than asked. I admitted we were. He nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he had long suspected about British people. "The English always walk. In the rain also. This I do not understand." He wrapped our bread with ceremonial precision and informed us that his nephew kept goats on the hillside, that the goats were troublemakers, and that we should under no circumstances attempt to feed them. I have no idea why he thought we would.

Later, at a small restaurant near the river, we fell into conversation with a table of locals who had clearly been there since the respectable hour of four o'clock. One woman, Ingrid, had the remarkable quality of asking questions that were simultaneously friendly and faintly interrogative. Where precisely was our house? Who had we booked through? Did we know that the previous occupants had been Dutch and very loud? She delivered this information with the satisfied air of someone who believes the neighbourhood watch system functions best when everyone knows everyone else's business. Her husband, a silent man called Manfred, occasionally contributed single words that Ingrid would then expand into entire paragraphs. "Cold," he said, when I mentioned the drive. "He means November is cold for driving, also the heating in your car, does it work properly? You must check this." I assured him it did. He looked unconvinced.

What struck me, as we walked back to the house with full stomachs and that particular tiredness that comes from genuine travel, was how immediately we had been absorbed into the fabric of the place. Not as tourists exactly, but as temporary characters in a long-running production where everyone knew their lines and their cues. Herr Brandt and his goat warnings. Ingrid and her husband's telepathic communication. The woman in the property office who had described the local swimming pool with the faint despair of someone who has explained its location eight thousand times.

I am not someone who typically seeks out conversation with strangers. My default setting is politely British, which is to say I would rather examine a shop's ceiling tiles than ask a fellow human about their day. But there is something about arriving somewhere new, slightly frazzled, slightly ridiculous with your forgotten keys and your motorway endurance, that opens you up to the kindness of people who have absolutely no obligation to be kind.

The house was warm when we entered. The garden smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke from somewhere nearby. Somewhere in the distance, presumably, Herr Brandt's nephew's goats were plotting their next act of criminal mischief. And I thought, not for the first time, that the best part of any journey is rarely the view from the top of the mountain. It is the person in the bakery who treats your terrible German as a reasonable effort worth acknowledging. It is Ingrid, who will definitely remember to ask about our car's heating if she sees us again.

We slept extraordinarily well that night, which I put down to the fresh air, the silence, and the particular exhaustion of having been properly, humanly welcomed.