I have never been brilliant at reading maps, and this became embarrassingly clear somewhere between Bremen and the North Sea coast. My other half had entrusted me with navigation duties for our autumn break in Tossens, a small holiday park in Lower Saxony, and I had managed to turn a straightforward two-hour drive into a three-and-a-half-hour scenic tour of every back lane in Cuxhaven district. The sat nav had given up on us twice. We finally rolled up to our wooden holiday home just as the October afternoon light was turning that particular sort of golden that makes you forgive absolutely everything.

The first thing that struck me was the smell. Not the sea exactly, though that was there underneath, but something more immediate: woodsmoke from a neighbouring chimney, damp leaves, and that clean, slightly metallic tang you only get from proper northern air in autumn. I stood in the gravel driveway with our bags still in the boot and just breathed it in, already feeling the office stress begin to unclench from my shoulders. My partner, less poetically inclined, was busy discovering that I had packed the wrong set of keys for the holiday home and had somehow brought our neighbour's house keys instead. There followed twenty minutes of increasingly creative problem-solving involving a very patient caretaker, a torch because the light was fading fast, and my fervent promise to sort my life out properly one of these days.

The seasonal timing shaped everything about that first evening. The park was quiet in a way that felt intentional rather than deserted. A few other cottages had lights glowing in their windows, but there was none of the summer bustle of children charging about or barbecue smoke hanging in humid air. Instead we had the particular hush of late autumn, when sound seems to carry differently and the darkness comes down with what feels like deliberate speed. By half past five it was properly night, and we found ourselves lighting every lamp in the place not because we needed them all, but because the cosiness felt earned somehow, a reward for being there at this particular time of year when most sensible people have packed away their holiday plans.

The cottage itself was exactly what we needed after my navigational failures. Wooden walls that seemed to hold warmth rather than just heat, a small kitchen where we made a supper of bread and cheese and the local wurst we had picked up in a panic at the last petrol station. We ate looking out at the blackness where I knew the marshland lay beyond, though I could not see it yet. That would come with morning. For now there was just the wind moving through what I later learned were the characteristic reeds and grasses of this stretch of coast, a sound I had never heard before and immediately loved.

I think what stayed with me from that first night was how completely the season had prepared the place for us. The summer crowds had done their thing and departed, leaving behind a stripped-back, honest version of the coast. No pretence at being somewhere glamorous. Just the North Sea in its autumn mood, a wooden cottage with decent heating, and the slightly ridiculous satisfaction of having navigated there eventually, wrong keys and all, to find something that felt genuinely restorative. We finished our simple supper, put more wood in the little stove, and went to bed early because the darkness outside seemed to invite it. I fell asleep listening to that wind and thinking that perhaps my map-reading catastrophe had been worth it, if only to arrive at exactly the right moment when the year was turning and the place was ready to be properly noticed.