I have never been so relieved to see a sat nav give up as I was somewhere outside Cuxhaven. "Recalculating," it said, for the seventh time, while I sat in a lay-by surrounded by cabbage fields that stretched to the horizon like a green ocean of coleslaw. My mishap? I had confidently ignored the rental car's advice to take the A27 and instead followed a "scenic route" suggested by a bloke in the queue at Stansted. His exact words were "you can't miss it," which is of course international code for "you absolutely will miss it, probably twice."

The S Marissa, when I finally found it, sat among trees in a hamlet so small I suspect the postman knows everyone's middle name. It is one of those solid, unhurried German houses that looks like it has been there since someone first thought "cabbage, that's the crop for Lower Saxony." White plaster, dark beams, a garden that has clearly known decades of careful tending. I stumbled out of the car with the theatrical exhaustion of a man who has just discovered that "scenic" means "lost among root vegetables."

My first proper conversation was with Herr Brandt, who lives in the house next door and appears to operate as the unofficial mayor, historian, and emergency cabbage consultant of the area. He materialised over the fence while I was still wrestling my suitcase from the boot, which opened directly into a hedge. "You are the English," he announced, rather than asked. "You took the wrong road." I asked how he knew. "Everyone takes the wrong road. The sat nav, it does not understand our cabbage." He said this with the resigned patience of a man who has watched many foreigners contemplate their life choices in a field of brassicas.

Herr Brandt introduced me to Frau Lindemann from across the lane, who was walking her dachshund with the solemn determination of someone undertaking a state occasion. The dog, Otto, was apparently famous in three villages for having once chased a delivery van eleven metres. "He is retired now," Frau Lindemann explained, as Otto regarded me with the suspicious dignity of a creature who knows his own legend. She insisted on showing me the proper way to operate the holiday home's back gate, which involved a latch technique she described as "old German engineering" and which I immediately forgot.

By evening I had accumulated what felt like a minor cast of characters. The teenager from the bakery in the next village, who served me a pretzel with such elaborate care that I suspected it was his first week and he was terrified of international incidents. The woman at the tiny supermarket who explained, entirely unprompted, that she did not trust the new organic eggs because "the chickens look too happy, it is suspicious." I bought six, naturally. You do, when someone puts it like that.

Sitting in the garden of the S Marissa that first night, with a beer from the fridge and the particular silence of the German countryside settling around me, I found myself reflecting on something. I had spent the journey furious at my own stubbornness, the sat nav's betrayal, the endless cabbage. Yet without all of that, I would have arrived efficiently, unpacked efficiently, and probably missed Herr Brandt entirely. There is something about being slightly ridiculous in a new place that opens doors, or at least garden gates with complicated latches. The locals do not remember the people who got everything right. They remember the Englishman in the lay-by, surrounded by his leafy green mistakes.

Otto the dachshund barked once from somewhere down the lane, a sound that carried perfectly in the stillness. I raised my beer in his general direction. We understood each other, I felt. Two creatures who had chased things we perhaps should not have, and lived to tell the tale.