We set off for Lower Saxony at half six in the morning, which in hindsight was optimistic with two children under eight and a boot packed so full it looked like we were emigrating. My partner had insisted on bringing his own pillow, a king-sized affair that took up most of the back seat, leaving the kids to argue for three hundred miles about whose knee was touching whose. By the time we crossed into Germany I had already eaten all the emergency Haribo and was eyeing the pillow with genuine hunger.

The sat nav did its best to confuse us, sending us down lanes so narrow that brambles scraped both wing mirrors simultaneously. We passed through a village with half-timbered houses that looked plucked from a biscuit tin, then another, then fields that stretched out flat and green in every direction. Lower Saxony does not believe in hills, apparently. It believes in cows, wind turbines, and the occasional enormous barn. We saw all three in abundance.

Then came the mishap. We found the cottage easily enough, a smart little place with timber cladding and a hot tub steaming away in the garden like a giant teacup. I was so relieved to have arrived that I flung open the car door with theatrical abandon, straight into a wooden post that I absolutely had seen and definitely intended to hit. The door bounced back with a clatter, I yelped, the kids went silent for one blessed second, and my partner simply closed his eyes in that particular way he has when he is choosing not to speak. The post was fine. My dignity was not. I spent the next ten minutes unloading bags while pretending I had meant to do it, that this was simply how I announced myself at holiday properties now.

The cottage itself was immediately forgiving. Warm pine smells, a kitchen that actually had more than one sharp knife, and a living area where the children discovered a box of board games and began arguing about Monopoly before I had even located the kettle. The hot tub sat outside under a wooden canopy, bubbling gently as if it had been waiting specifically for our exhausted family to collapse into it. I made tea with German tea bags that were surprisingly robust and stood at the window watching a tractor move across a distant field with the unhurried pace of someone who has never once flung a car door into a post.

What struck me most was the quiet. Not silence exactly, because the children were already staging a coup over who got the bedroom with the bunk beds, but the underlying hush of countryside that lets you hear yourself think. No motorway drone, no neighbour's telly through the wall, just birds and the occasional distant bark of a dog that sounded as relaxed as we hoped to be.

By evening we had established our pattern. The kids in the hot tub until their fingers went wrinkly, then into pyjamas for a supper of bread and cheese and whatever we could assemble without proper shopping. My partner finally abandoned his pillow on the sofa in favour of the provided ones, which he admitted were "actually not bad" in the grudging tone of a man who had lugged a king-sized cushion across two countries for no reason. I sat with my feet up, door-related bruise throbbing gently, and felt that particular shift that happens on holiday when you stop performing relaxation and actually begin to feel it.

Lower Saxony had welcomed us with flat fields, excellent tea, and a wooden post that I will never live down. The hot tub steamed on into the dusk, and for the first time that day, nobody was arguing about whose knee was where.