I have never been so grateful for a pair of wellies in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once wore flip-flops to a wedding in the Lake District. The journey to Fischerdorf Zirchow on Usedom had been going so well until I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I absolutely needed to stretch my legs at a service station just past Berlin. One misplaced step into what I confidently assumed was a puddle later, and my left trainer was making a noise like a drowning goose with every step. This set the tone rather beautifully for what turned out to be a walking holiday dominated by weather that could not make up its mind.

The Fischerdorf itself was charming in that understated Baltic way, all wooden cottages clustered together like they were sharing secrets about the sea. I dumped my soggy luggage, changed into the aforementioned wellies, and set off with the earnest ambition of a person who has read exactly half a guidebook. The path to the Achterwasser, that shallow lagoon separating Usedom from the mainland, was supposed to be a gentle twenty-minute stroll. It took me forty because I kept stopping to argue with myself about whether that cloud meant business or was merely showing off.

The Achterwasser on that first afternoon was doing its best impression of a moody watercolour, all grey-green ripples and sudden flashes of silver when the sun bothered to appear. I walked along the dyke feeling terribly continental, nodding at fellow wanderers as if I did this sort of thing all the time. Then the rain arrived. Not English drizzle, which I could have handled with my eyes closed, but proper Baltic rain that seemed to come horizontally from three directions at once. I squelched back to the cottage looking like a disappointed heron, already laughing at my own optimism.

Day two dawned with the kind of bright, brittle sunshine that fools you completely. I set off for Zirchow village itself, a proper little place with red-brick houses and a church tower that has probably seen worse walkers than me. The fields between the Fischerdorf and the village were absurdly flat, which I found both liberating and slightly unnerving, like being in a place where the horizon has forgotten how to behave. I walked past farmsteads with names I could not pronounce, past horses standing in paddocks with the resigned patience of animals who have seen every kind of weather and stopped caring decades ago.

The sunshine held for nearly two hours, which I counted as a personal victory. I found a bench near a pond and sat there like a pensioner, watching dragonflies perform their frantic choreography. Then I noticed the wind picking up, that particular Baltic wind that starts as a suggestion and ends as a full-blown argument. By the time I reached the edge of Zirchow, the sky had turned the colour of a bruised plum and I was walking at a forty-five degree angle just to stay upright.

I took shelter in a bus stop, which is not something I have done since I was sixteen and trying to impress someone who was not worth the pneumonia. There I stood, watching my walking holiday dissolve into performance art, and I had one of those moments of clarity that only seem to arrive when you are slightly uncomfortable and definitely ridiculous. I had come to Usedom with a plan, a list of routes and distances and self-improving intentions, and the weather had simply laughed at me. But the fields were still there, the dykes still stretched out towards the water, and the wellies had proven themselves utterly indispensable. Perhaps the walking was not the point at all. Perhaps the point was standing in a German bus stop, wind-battered and grinning, finally understanding that the best holidays are the ones that refuse to cooperate.

The rain passed, as rain always does if you wait long enough, and I walked back to the Fischerdorf by a longer route, deliberately choosing the path that kept me closest to the water. My wellies squelched in a rhythm I had grown fond of. The sky cleared to reveal a pale, exhausted blue, and somewhere a skylark was making an effort that seemed almost heroic. I arrived back at the cottage as the light was fading, legs tired, hair catastrophic, already plotting which direction to fail at tomorrow.