I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I managed to leave our house with three children, two suitcases, and precisely zero packets of teabags. This, from a man who once packed an entire espresso machine for a weekend in Skegness. My wife gave me that look as we pulled onto the A20 towards Rostock, the one that says "I love you but you are a complete liability."

The ferry from Gedser to Rostock was mercifully calm, though our youngest discovered the joy of repeatedly pressing the button for the onboard announcement system. By the time we reached Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, I had memorised the safety instructions in three languages and developed a twitch in my left eye. Still, the drive across to Altefaehr on Rugen island had that proper holiday feeling, all flat fields and sudden glimpses of water, the kind of landscape that makes you want to breathe out properly for the first time in months.

We found the cottage down a lane that turned from tarmac to gravel to something suspiciously like compacted sand. My phone had given up pretending it knew where we were. The satnav kept suggesting we make a U-turn into a field of maize. My wife unfolded the printed directions with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had predicted exactly this scenario. I chose not to mention that she had also predicted I would forget the teabags.

The cottage itself sat among trees with that particular Baltic coast stillness, the sort where you can hear a bee from twenty metres away. White-painted, modest, with a terrace that looked towards the Strelasund. I immediately began planning evenings with a beer and absolutely nothing else. My children had already discovered the garden and were engaged in what appeared to be competitive stick-collecting.

Here is where I must confess something. In my enthusiasm to be the hero who unlocked the door, I misread the key code email and tried the wrong combination seventeen times. Seventeen. I became increasingly theatrical about the "faulty lock," performing little diagnostic kicks and muttering about German engineering, before my wife calmly pointed out I had transposed two digits. The door opened on her first attempt. I laughed in that particular way men do when they are absolutely not laughing.

Inside, the place had that immediate sense of rightness you sometimes get with holiday rentals. Light wood, simple furniture, a kitchen that looked actually used rather than purely decorative. The children thundered upstairs to claim sleeping territories like small colonial powers. I stood in the living room with my inadequate suitcase and felt something unknot in my shoulders. Through the window, the Strelasund gleamed in that pale Baltic blue, and a heron lifted off from somewhere I couldn't see.

My wife made tea with bags she had sensibly packed herself. We sat on the terrace as the afternoon settled into evening, watching our children negotiate a complex treaty regarding garden boundaries. Somewhere a cockerel crowed at entirely the wrong time of day. I thought about how I had driven us here, forgotten the teabags, misread the code, and yet somehow still ended up exactly where I wanted to be, doing absolutely nothing of any consequence whatsoever.

That first evening, we walked down to the water's edge as the light went soft and golden. The children threw stones with the intense seriousness children bring to stone-throwing. My wife took my hand in that companionable way that suggests she has forgiven, or possibly forgotten, the teabag situation. The ferry from Stralsund crossed the Strelasund in the distance, lights beginning to show against the darkening water.

Back at the cottage, we cooked simple food in the kitchen and ate at the wooden table with the windows open to the garden sounds. A moth the size of a small aircraft investigated the light fitting. The children, exhausted by travel and fresh air, fell asleep with the ease they absolutely never manage at home. My wife and I sat outside with what I will call a restorative beverage, listening to nothing much at all.

I thought about how we had arrived, chaotic and imperfect, teabagless and directionally challenged, and how none of it mattered even slightly. The heron came back, or perhaps a different heron, settling somewhere in the dusk. Tomorrow we would explore properly, find the local bakery, perhaps brave the Baltic water if the weather held. For now, there was this: a simple cottage, a quiet garden, the particular peace of having nowhere particular to be.

I went to bed that night with sand in my shoes and a proper tiredness in my bones, the kind that comes from actual doing rather than the exhausted inertia of ordinary life. Somewhere in the garden, a hedgehog was making its determined way through the borders. I could hear it, or imagined I could, small rustlings in the dark. I fell asleep thinking that I might, just possibly, remember to buy teabags in the morning, and knowing with absolute certainty that I probably would not.