I have never been one to trust a sat nav implicitly, and yet there I was, somewhere between Hamburg and the middle of absolutely nowhere, watching ours try to convince me that a farm track was definitely the main road to Feriendorf Wardersee. The potholes were heroic. The puddles were biblical. And when a tractor appeared round a bend and forced me to reverse fifty metres into a field gateway, I discovered that Schleswig-Holstein mud has a viscosity that would interest industrial chemists. My partner laughed so hard she nearly dropped the road atlas, which I had smugly declared unnecessary back in Calais.

We arrived at the holiday park in what I can only describe as a state of agricultural dishevelment. The receptionist was far too polite to mention the mud spatters up to the windows, though her eyebrows performed a small gymnastics routine. Feriendorf Wardersee sits on the edge of the eponymous lake, all wooden chalets and pine trees and that particular hush that comes from being surrounded by water and proper northern European forest. Our chalet smelled of fresh timber and cleaning products, which is exactly what you want after four hours of increasingly questionable navigation decisions.

I had plans, you see. Grand walking plans. I had downloaded routes, studied contour maps, packed my serious boots. The next morning I bounded out like a man who had never checked a German weather forecast in his life. The sky was doing that particular Schleswig-Holstein thing where it looks merely overcast but is actually storing precipitation like a grudge. I made it perhaps three kilometres along the lakeside path before the drizzle began, and I use "drizzle" in the British sense of "actually quite wet if you stand in it long enough, which I did."

I am stubborn about weather. This is a British trait I cannot shake. There is a particular pride in continuing with outdoor plans despite meteorological hostility, as if moisture were a personal challenge rather than a physical phenomenon. I walked on. The path circled through birch woods where the leaves were just turning, that proper autumn gold against grey water, and I will admit there was something magnificent about being the only fool out in it. The rain intensified. My waterproof, purchased in a moment of optimism from a discount outdoors shop, proved itself merely water-resistant in the way that a sieve is water-resistant. I squelched back to the chalet looking like a man who had attempted to swim the Wardersee in hiking trousers.

My partner took one look and produced the kettle with the silent efficiency of someone who has seen this before. We spent the afternoon drying everything over the chalet's excellent radiator system, which I had previously dismissed as excessive German engineering but now regarded as miraculous. I sat in damp socks with a cup of tea and stared out at the lake, where the rain was now falling with what I can only call theatrical commitment.

The following days brought a negotiation. I learned to walk early, before the afternoon weather turned. I learned that the forest paths nearer the park, the ones through the mixed woodland between the chalets and the shore, were manageable in light rain because the tree cover actually meant something. I discovered that Schleswig-Holstein weather changes its mind approximately every forty minutes, and that the trick was to go out in the doubtful gaps, the maybe-moments, to stride fast while the striding was good.

There is a particular loop I did repeatedly, heading south from the park through damp meadows where the grass was silvered with moisture, then cutting back through pine plantation where the needles made a soft carpet and the rain, when it came, pattered overhead rather than falling directly. I saw no one on these walks. The holiday park emptied in poor weather, everyone sensible enough to stay inside with board games and the excellent local bread. I passed their warm windows like a ghost, a moving blur of Gore-Tex and poor planning.

On the fourth day I attempted something ambitious, a longer circuit that would have taken me properly round the western shore. The sky was wrong from the start, that low bruised colour that promises nothing good, but I went anyway because I had become peculiarly invested in proving something to myself. I made it halfway before the heavens opened with a thoroughness that felt almost personal. I sheltered under an oak for twenty minutes, watching the lake disappear into grey, then gave up and trudged back. My boots had finally surrendered. Water found paths through seams I had not known existed. I arrived at the chalet and simply stood in the shower, clothes and all, before peeling everything off like a sad onion.

That evening, properly dry at last, I walked a different way. Just round the park, on the paved paths between chalets, in the dark with a torch while my partner read inside. The rain had stopped. The lake was invisible, just a breathing darkness beyond the trees, and the pine smell was intense after the wet. I walked slowly, no destination, no route to prove. It was perhaps the best walk of the whole holiday.

I think sometimes I mistake difficulty for value, weathering for worth. The soggy epics, the heroic struggles against drizzle, they make better stories certainly. But there was something in that quiet night circuit, the simple pleasure of moving through damp air without striving, that taught me something I keep trying to forget and keep needing to relearn. The next morning I walked the same easy loop again, in daylight this time, and when the rain started I simply turned back, unheroic and dry-shod and perfectly content.