I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send us through a field near Anklam. There we were, three hours out of Berlin, two children asking if we were nearly there yet, and me insisting we "trust the technology" while my partner gave me that look. You know the one. The look that says, "You said this would be relaxing."

The mishap came five minutes from Fischerdorf Zirchow, when I confidently turned down what I swore was the lane to our cottage. It was not the lane. It was, in fact, someone's very private driveway, complete with a very large and very unimpressed German shepherd who watched me perform a twelve-point turn with the kind of silent judgment I usually only get from my mother-in-law. We reversed past a hedge, scraped a wheelie bin, and finally found the actual entrance. I laughed. My partner did not. The children cheered because they had spotted the playground.

First impressions of Fischerdorf Zirchow hit me like a fresh Baltic breeze, which is fitting because the sea is practically winking at you from every angle. The place clusters together like a proper old fishing settlement, all timber frames and steep roofs, the sort of architecture that makes you feel you have stepped into a slightly wonky postcard. Our cottage sat near the edge of the cluster, close enough to hear families barbecuing, far enough that the morning mist felt like it belonged just to us.

Opening the door brought that particular holiday cottage smell: wood polish, faint damp, and the ghost of a thousand previous fry-ups. The children bolted upstairs to claim beds, which meant thirty seconds of territorial screaming followed by an uneasy treaty. I stood in the little kitchen and immediately knocked my head on a beam that had been positioned, I am convinced, specifically to punish anyone over five foot eight. My partner found this hilarious. Karma, apparently, is real and it lives in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

What struck me most was the quiet. Not silence exactly, because birds were having what sounded like a very heated discussion in the reeds nearby, and somewhere a dog barked with the relaxed rhythm of a creature who has never known a deadline. But proper quiet. The kind that makes you aware of your own breathing and suddenly conscious that you have been holding your shoulders near your ears for approximately six months.

We dumped our bags and wandered down to the little harbour area, if you can call it that. Small boats bobbed, a man in waders sorted nets with the methodical patience of someone who has never once considered mindfulness apps because he already has this. The children threw stones in the water, which is apparently the universal childhood language regardless of country. My partner and I stood there, slightly stunned by the simplicity of it all, and I had one of those moments. The gentle kind. The ones where you realise that your shoulders have dropped, that your jaw has unclenched, that you have not checked your phone in forty minutes and the world has somehow not ended.

I thought about that wrong turn on the way in. The dog, the wheelie bin, my stubbornness. How often I barrel through life convinced I know the route, refusing to admit I am lost until something large forces me to turn around. There in Zirchow, with the salt on the air and my family bickering happily about who saw the biggest fish, it felt okay to have got it slightly wrong. The detour had still brought us here.

That evening we cooked sausages on the little terrace, fought off midges with more enthusiasm than success, and watched the sky turn that particular Baltic pink that seems to last forever. The children fell asleep in their clothes. My partner and I sat with cheap German beer and said very little, which said everything.

I still have a small dent in the car from the wheelie bin. I am strangely fond of it.