I have never been so relieved to see a sat nav give up as I was when ours finally conceded defeat somewhere outside Zittau. "Recalculating," it announced for the seventh time, before falling silent entirely, apparently exhausted by the winding lanes of Upper Lusatia. My wife gave me that look. The children had already entered the glazed stage of a six-hour drive from Dresden. And I, in my infinite wisdom, had insisted we take the scenic route.

The mishap came shortly after. Spotting what I assumed was our turning, I swung the car down a narrow track lined with apple trees, feeling rather pleased with myself. The track became a path. The path became mud. And the mud, inevitably, became a small ditch from which our estate car gazed up at us with something like automotive despair. A farmer appeared from nowhere, leaning on a gate with the patience of a man who has seen this exact scene a hundred times before. He spoke no English. My German extends to ordering beer and apologising, neither of which seemed immediately useful. Through gestures, grunts, and what I later learned was me accidentally promising to marry his tractor, we got towed free. I handed him a twenty-euro note. He looked at it, looked at me, and laughed for a solid minute before pocketing it.

We found the proper lane ten minutes later. The cottage sat at the edge of Grossschoenau, a village so quietly pretty it felt almost apologetic about itself. Timber-framed houses, a proper church spire, gardens exploding with late summer flowers. Our place was one of those traditional Upper Lusatian houses, all dark beams and steep roof, with a small garden that backed onto fields. The key was in the lockbox as promised, though it took me an embarrassingly long time to work the code, standing there in my mud-splattered trousers while a neighbour watered her window boxes with studied indifference.

Opening the door released that particular smell of old wood, recent cleaning, and something faintly herby. The children bolted past me, claiming rooms with the territorial urgency of colonial powers. I stood in the hallway and felt something shift. The drive, the ditch, the farmer's laughter, the sat nav's desertion - all of it suddenly seemed part of the price of admission rather than obstacles to overcome.

The cottage was comfortably untidy in that way holiday lets have when they are genuinely lived in rather than staged. Mismatched mugs. A sofa with the permanent impression of previous guests. Books in German that I kept meaning to try reading. The kitchen window looked out over a small patio where a barbecue sat rusting with optimistic purpose. My wife found a coffee maker and immediately began the ritual of making the place ours, opening cupboards, rearranging chairs, establishing territory.

I took a beer from the fridge - stocked, blessedly, with a few local pilsners - and walked into the garden. The fields beyond were golden in the late afternoon, and somewhere a dog barked with the lazy regularity of a creature with nowhere particular to be. I thought about the farmer, probably still chuckling. I thought about my stubbornness with the scenic route, my refusal to admit when directions have beaten me. There is something about arriving somewhere after difficulty that makes the arrival itself feel earned rather than merely happened upon.

The children appeared, demanding to know about dinner, about wifi passwords, about whether there were bicycles. My wife joined us, coffee in hand, already looking more relaxed than she had in months. We stood there, slightly muddy, slightly lost, slightly ridiculous, and watched the light change over the Saxony countryside.

That first evening, we walked to the village shop, bought bread and cheese and some local sausage I could not properly name, and ate on the patio as the bats came out. Nothing remarkable happened. The children bickered gently. My wife and I talked about nothing in particular. I opened a second beer and felt the particular pleasure of having absolutely nowhere to be.

The sat nav never recovered. I threw it in a drawer on our second day and we navigated by guesswork and occasional friendly pointing from locals. It was better that way. Some things, I am slowly learning, are not meant to be optimised.