I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I packed the sat nav but forgot the charging cable. There we were, three hours out of Berlin on the A20, my phone clinging to four percent battery like a man on a cliff edge, and my wife reading directions off a screenshot while the kids argued about who had eaten the last Haribo in Schwerin. By the time we crossed onto Usedom island, I was navigating by instinct, road signs, and the occasional hopeful glance at passing cyclists.

We found the turning eventually, a narrow lane threading between pine trees and fields that looked like they had not changed since someone last mentioned the Hanseatic League. The cottage sat at the end, all timber cladding and sensible German windows, with a terrace that promised evenings of wine and pretending we would barbecue properly rather than just burning sausages. My daughter announced she needed the toilet approximately eleven seconds after I turned off the engine. My son opened his door into a bush. I sat for a moment, breathing in the smell of resin and sea air somewhere in the distance, and felt something in my shoulders finally drop.

The key was in the lockbox as promised, though I managed to spend five minutes trying the wrong code before realising I had been reading my own handwriting upside down. Inside, the place had that particular holiday cottage quality of being spotlessly clean yet somehow encouraging you to immediately make a mess. The kitchen opened into a living area with enough sofas for a small village, and sliding doors led onto that terrace, where a garden stretched down to a hedge and beyond it, glimpses of proper countryside. My wife started opening cupboards with the methodical purpose of someone who knows exactly where the wine glasses should be. The children had already disappeared upstairs to claim beds, a process that involved shouting and what sounded like a minor territorial dispute.

I stepped outside with my coffee the next morning, still in the trousers I had travelled in because I had forgotten which bag contained my jeans. The silence was almost shocking. Back home we live on a road where someone is always revving something or delivering something or arguing about parking. Here, nothing. A blackbird in the hedge. Distant geese, perhaps. The sea was not visible but you could sense it, that particular flatness to the light that comes from water nearby. I stood there feeling slightly foolish in my travel-wrinkled clothes, holding a mug with a chip in the rim, and thought about how rarely I do absolutely nothing without feeling guilty about it.

The mishaps continued, of course. I misjudged the shower and flooded the bathroom slightly. We discovered the local supermarket closed at six precisely, leaving us with pasta and a questionable jar of sauce for dinner. My son fell off a bike we had hired and spent an hour with a bag of frozen peas on his knee, which he later tried to return to the freezer before anyone noticed. But these felt like the right kind of problems, the sort that come from being somewhere unfamiliar rather than the grinding exhaustion of ordinary life.

By the third day, we had settled into a rhythm. Mornings on the terrace with bread from the bakery in Koserow, afternoons doing very little in the garden or wandering down lanes that smelled of warm pine, evenings with board games and the occasional successful barbecue. The cottage had become ours in that way temporary places do, scattered with shoes and books and the particular debris of family life.

I never did find my jeans until we packed to leave.