I have never been a natural at packing the car for a self-catering holiday, and our trip to S In Seenaehe Marissa in Lower Saxony proved no exception. Somewhere past Osnabruck, with the kids already bickering about who had more foot room, I realised I had left the entire bag of chargers on the kitchen table at home. My phone was on four percent, the sat nav had given up the ghost twenty minutes earlier, and my wife was giving me that particular look that says she is choosing not to say something. We limped into the village following handwritten directions I had screenshot weeks before, squinting at road signs in the fading light and hoping desperately that German country lanes were more forgiving than they appeared.

The property sits near a lake, which I had been banging on about since booking, and I will admit the first glimpse of water through the trees did make me feel briefly like a competent family man rather than a disorganised one. We found the key safe, fumbled the code twice in the dark, and practically fell through the front door with that particular exhaustion that comes from driving across three countries with small children who need the loo every seventeen minutes. The hallway smelled of pine and something faintly citrus, which I later discovered was a reed diffuser my wife immediately declared she wanted to buy for our own house. She has said this at every holiday let we have ever stayed in, and we have never once bought one.

The living area was warmer than I expected, with that solid, slightly old-fashioned furniture that makes you feel like you are borrowing someone's actual home rather than staying in a sterile rental. The kids shot upstairs to claim bedrooms before we had even set down the bags, and I heard the elder one announce with theatrical despair that she had forgotten her favourite pyjamas. I said nothing. I had forgotten the chargers. We were all culpable here.

I made tea with the kettle, which took approximately forty seconds longer than a British kettle and therefore felt like an act of foreign resistance. We sat on the slightly stiff sofa with our mugs and surveyed the garden through the patio doors, just visible in the porch light. A bat flitted past, and my son announced he was going to live here forever. He says this everywhere, but I understood the sentiment. There was something immediately grounding about the place. The lake was close enough to promise proper adventures tomorrow, but far enough that you felt tucked away, private, unobserved.

My wife found the information folder and read aloud that there were cycle paths, that the nearest proper shop was a ten-minute drive, that the local bread van came past on certain mornings if you listened for the horn. I felt a small flutter of panic at the bread van concept. What time? How would we know? What if we missed it and had to explain to the children that their holiday breakfast was ruined because their father could not interpret a German bread schedule? These are the thoughts that occupy me now, I reflected, rather than work emails or the news. Perhaps this was the point.

We unpacked by torchlight because I had also, it emerged, packed the wrong adapter for the bedside lamps. The children were asleep in minutes, flattened by travel. My wife and I stood in the kitchen with our cold tea and listened to the unfamiliar quiet, broken occasionally by what I chose to believe was a friendly owl rather than something more sinister in the woods. "It's nice," she said, which from her is high praise. I agreed, and meant it, and felt a small, unexpected peace settle somewhere in my chest. Tomorrow I would work out the bread van, and the chargers, and probably get lost on a cycle path. Tonight, though, we were here, and that was enough.