I have never been so relieved to see a sign for a holiday park in my entire life, and that includes the time we accidentally drove to Belgium. The journey up to Schleswig-Holstein had seemed so straightforward when my partner plotted it on the map that morning. Four and a half hours, she said. Easy run up through Hamburg. What she had failed to account for was my inexplicable talent for misreading German road signs under pressure, which is how we found ourselves circling the same roundabout near Neumunster three times while the children conducted a lively debate about whose fault it was that we were now forty minutes late and someone needed a wee quite urgently.

The mishap that truly defined our arrival, however, was my own brilliant idea to "just pop into a supermarket for essentials" roughly two miles from the Feriendorf Wardersee. I emerged twenty minutes later laden with what I genuinely believed were sensible provisions: bread, cheese, a modest selection of local beers, and what I thought was a large pot of yoghurt. It was not yoghurt. It was quark, which I had somehow failed to notice despite the packaging being almost entirely devoted to pictures of potatoes and chives. The children looked at me with the particular disappointment they reserve for my culinary decisions. My partner opened it, sniffed it, and laughed for a solid minute. I ate it anyway, out of stubbornness mostly, and spent the rest of the evening making deeply average jokes about my "quark attack."

But then we turned down the lane toward the park, and something shifted. The Wardersee itself appeared through the trees, flat and calm and impossibly still, and I felt my shoulders drop about three inches. The Feriendorf sits right on its edge, a cluster of neat wooden cottages with that particular Scandinavian-influenced architecture you find up here in the north, all pale timber and angled roofs designed to shed the kind of weather I suspect arrives with enthusiasm during the darker months. In late July, though, everything was green and soft and slightly overgrown in that generous German way, flower beds spilling over themselves and grass that clearly enjoyed regular attention.

Our cottage was one of the smaller ones, DSH023 if you are being specific, which we were when the children immediately claimed bedrooms and left us with the sofa bed and a view of the car park. I did not mind. The living area opened straight onto a little wooden deck, and beyond that a strip of grass led down to the water. I stood there with my dubious quark and a cup of tea made with the odd German kettle, and watched a family of ducks conduct what appeared to be a swimming lesson. The light was that particular flat northern gold, the kind that makes everything look slightly nostalgic even as it is happening.

The cottage itself had that comfortable, slightly scuffed quality of a place genuinely used by families. Nothing was too precious. The kitchen had the basic pots and pans you actually need, not the decorative nonsense you find in fancier places. There were board games with missing pieces and a television that required three remotes and some optimistic button-pressing. Within an hour, our youngest had managed to scatter an entire deck of cards across the floor and our eldest had established a complicated system for claiming the best chair. It felt, immediately, like somewhere we could breathe out.

I keep thinking about that first evening, the four of us squashed around the small dining table eating bread and cheese and my heroic quark, the windows open to the sound of the lake and someone else's barbecue drifting across from a few cottages down. My partner caught my eye at one point, mid-chew, and we both smiled without saying anything. The journey had been ridiculous. I had bought potato quark. The sofa bed awaited. And yet here we were, in this quiet corner of Schleswig-Holstein, with nothing much to do for a week except wander down to the water and let the children get grubby and remember what it felt like to not really mind about anything very much.