I have never been more grateful for a Thermos flask than I was on the drive to our little place in Lower Saxony. My partner, ever the optimist, had insisted we could "easily" manage the journey from Calais in one go, which is how we ended up at a petrol station somewhere near Osnabruck at half past midnight, arguing about whether the satnav was conspiring against us. It was. I had accidentally typed "Seenaehe" with an extra 'e' at the end, and the blessed machine had been trying to find a lake that did not exist for the previous forty minutes. We arrived at the property at two in the morning, me white-knuckled from navigating winding lanes, my partner snoring gently with a half-eaten bag of Haribo tangled in his lap.

Morning arrived with the sort of grey determination that any Brit recognises immediately. I stood at the kitchen window of our holiday home clutching coffee, watching the mist roll off the nearby lake in proper Gothic fashion. The house itself was exactly the sort of solid, unpretentious German construction I have come to love - all sensible angles and a garden that looked like someone had once cared passionately about it, then slightly lost interest. There were apple trees, heavy with fruit, and a terrace where I immediately decided we would spend every evening. Reader, we did not.

We had planned, you see, to walk. Extensively. Heroically. I had downloaded routes, studied maps, packed boots that had seen Snowdonia and survived. The first morning we set off toward the lake path in high spirits, me in a new waterproof that I had assured my partner was "proper hillwalking kit." It was not. Within twenty minutes the heavens opened with the kind of sustained, almost architectural rain that only northern Germany can produce. My "waterproof" became a sort of personal water feature. We squelched back to the house looking like contestants from a very low-budget survival programme, and I spent the afternoon draped across the radiator like a wet cat.

The following day dawned suspiciously bright. Germans, I have noticed, possess a weather optimism that borders on the religious. A neighbour waved cheerfully as we passed, apparently seeing nothing concerning about the bruise-coloured clouds gathering to the west. We walked anyway, because we are British and stubborn, following a track through beech woods that smelled of autumn and damp earth. For perhaps ninety minutes it was genuinely glorious - the lake visible through gaps in the trees, herons standing about with the self-conscious posture of people waiting for buses.

Then the hail started.

I have experienced hail before. This was different. This hail had commitment, a career plan, a pension scheme. We sheltered under a remarkably inadequate oak while ice bounced off our heads and my partner, with the hollow laugh of a man questioning his life choices, observed that at least it was "proper weather." We were perhaps two miles from the house by this point, and those two miles took us through what I can only describe as meteorological warfare. By the time we stumbled back onto our terrace, the sun had emerged, mocking us with golden light while we dripped and shivered.

I spent that evening in dry clothes with a mug of something medicinal, watching the lake through the window. The weather had become, I realised, the entire point. We had not conquered the landscape with our walking boots and our laminated maps. We had been thoroughly, repeatedly defeated by it, and there was something oddly freeing in that. The house felt more welcoming for our sodden failures - the sensible German heating, the comfortable chairs, the kitchen where we cooked proper meals instead of the picnic lunches we had planned.

On our third morning I woke to genuine, unthreatening sunshine. We walked a shorter loop, stayed closer to the property, kept one eye permanently on the horizon. It was perfect. The lake path was muddy but manageable, the woods smelled even better when you were not fleeing from them, and we returned actually dry for the first time. I made tea on the terrace and felt, briefly, like we had mastered something.

We had not, of course. The rain returned that afternoon, persistent and unhurried. But I sat inside with my book and my second-best waterproof hung over a chair to dry, and I found I did not mind at all. Some holidays are about what you do. This one, I think, was about learning to stop doing, to let the weather win, to find the particular pleasure of a warm house when everything outside is doing its absolute worst. We walked, we got wet, we retreated, we tried again. It was, in its strange way, exactly what I needed.