I have never been particularly good with directions, which is why I found myself reversing a hire car down a narrow lane in Schleswig-Holstein while a very patient German woman watched from her garden with the expression of someone who has seen this many times before. The satnav had confidently announced we had arrived at our Buesum holiday home approximately four hundred metres ago, somewhere in the vicinity of a field of very unimpressed cows.

My partner, who had been navigating with the kind of optimism that only comes from never having been in a car with me before, suggested we stop and actually read the address. Revolutionary thinking, that. We eventually found the property down a sandy track that looked more suited to tractors than our modest VW, and I performed a parking manoeuvre that will haunt me for years. Let us simply say the hedge and I are no longer on speaking terms.

The Buesum itself, once we located it, was one of those charming North Frisian properties that looks like it has been quietly minding its own business since before anyone thought to put numbers on doors. Whitewashed walls, a proper thatched roof, and windows that seemed to squint at us with gentle suspicion. I stepped out of the car and immediately sank into soft sand up to my ankle, which set the tone rather nicely for the whole arrival experience.

The key was supposedly in a lockbox, which sounds straightforward until you realise the lockbox had apparently been installed by someone with a passion for puzzles. Twenty minutes of increasingly creative swearing later, during which I managed to scrape my knuckle and drop the code sheet into a puddle, the door swung open with the kind of theatrical creak that horror films spend thousands trying to achieve.

Inside smelled of salt and old timber and something I could not quite place, which turned out to be the dried lavender hanging in the kitchen. The floorboards announced every step with enthusiastic commentary. I walked what felt like three paces and found myself in the living area, then another two and I was practically in the bedroom. Compact, they call it. I call it an architectural masterclass in making every centimetre earn its keep.

My partner had gone straight to the terrace doors, which opened onto a small garden with a view I had not been prepared for. Flat green marshland stretched towards the North Sea, and somewhere beyond the dyke I could hear the faint percussion of waves. The light was doing that particular coastal thing where everything looks slightly golden and unreal. I stood there with my sandy foot and my bruised knuckle and felt something in my chest loosen in a way that travel brochures promise but reality rarely delivers.

Then I turned around and walked straight into a low beam.

The Buesum had, I discovered, been built for people of a more modest vertical ambition. I spent the rest of the evening navigating the ground floor with my hand hovering protectively above my head like a man performing an impromptu salute. We found the kitchen properly stocked, which was fortunate because neither of us had the energy to venture back out after the journey and the lockbox ordeal. I made tea with the kind of kettle that requires you to commit to the process, none of your instant gratification here.

By the time we sat on that terrace with our mugs, watching the light fade over the marsh, I had already decided that the bruise forming on my forehead was a small price to pay. The chaos of arrival had been entirely self-inflicted, I knew that. The satnav, the hedge, the lockbox, the beam. All of it me, rushing, assuming, not paying proper attention. There is something about the flat calm of that landscape that makes your own noise feel particularly foolish.

A heron lifted from the reeds somewhere out of sight, and I could hear my own breathing slowing to match the rhythm of the place. Tomorrow we would walk the dyke path, perhaps venture to the harbour for fish straight from the boats, maybe even work out which of the local walking routes would not immediately defeat my sense of direction. But for now, there was just the cooling tea, the creaking floorboards behind us, and the particular peace of having finally, despite everything, arrived exactly where we were meant to be.