I should have known our family break to Happy Holidays Ostseeresort Olpenitz was off to a classic start when I confidently loaded the sat nav with what I swore was the correct postcode, only to find myself leading a convoy of increasingly grumpy children and a husband doing that tight-lipped breathing thing through a village that looked suspiciously flat and Danish. Turns out Schleswig-Holstein and I needed to have a serious conversation about geography. Forty-five minutes of scenic wrong turns later, we finally spotted the Ostseeresort sign and I performed what can only be described as a triumphant but slightly desperate parking manoeuvre.

The resort sits right on the Kappeln fjord, that stretch of water where the Schlei meets the Baltic, and stepping out of the car the first thing that hit me was that particular coastal smell of salt and seaweed and whatever magic they pump into north German air to make you immediately forget you have a job. Our cottage was one of those modern timber-framed numbers with enormous windows that practically beg you to stand at them holding a mug of something hot, looking contemplative. I did this approximately seven minutes after arrival. The children had already disappeared to investigate the shared garden and were engaged in what sounded like a territorial dispute over a football.

The interior was exactly the sort of clean Scandinavian-influenced design that makes you simultaneously admire the aesthetic and panic slightly about your family's capacity to keep anything that pale looking presentable. The open-plan living area flowed into a kitchen that actually had enough mugs for everyone, a small miracle in holiday rental world. I immediately claimed the corner sofa by leaving my jumper on it, a manoeuvre my husband pretended not to notice.

What struck me most that first evening was the light. The Schlei has this particular quality at dusk, something to do with the water and the flat landscape beyond, that makes everything look gently golden and worth photographing even though your phone never captures it properly. I took twelve identical photos anyway. We opened the wine we'd bought at a supermarket somewhere during my navigational detour, and sat on the little terrace while the children discovered that German television includes channels dedicated entirely to cartoons we couldn't understand but they found hilarious.

I found myself watching a heron stand completely still in the shallows for what must have been twenty minutes, and realised with a small jolt that I couldn't remember the last time I'd watched anything that wasn't a screen for that long without getting restless. There's something about this corner of Schleswig-Holstein that slows you down whether you've planned it or not. The fjord doesn't rush. The heron certainly doesn't rush. And somehow, despite the sat nav chaos and the usual holiday unpacking chaos and the realisation that I'd packed three left flip-flops and no right ones, I didn't feel like rushing either.

That first night I slept better than I had in months, lulled by what I told myself was the water but was probably just exhaustion and relief. I woke to the sound of my husband attempting to work out the coffee machine with the determined expression of a man who won't read instructions on principle. Through the window, the Schlei was doing that misty morning thing that makes you feel like you're in a film, albeit a very low-stakes one where the main drama is whether someone remembered to buy milk.

We'd brought bikes, because every website about this area mentions the cycling routes along the fjord, and by mid-morning we were wobbling along the path towards Kappeln, the nearest proper town. It's only a couple of miles, flat as a pancake, which was fortunate given my fitness level and the children's unpredictable steering. Kappeln itself is one of those working harbours that hasn't quite decided if it's picturesque or industrial, so it's ended up being both, with fishing boats alongside smart yachts and the smell of smoked fish drifting from somewhere that we immediately needed to find.

We didn't do much that first full day, if I'm honest. A bit of cycling, a bit of wandering, a lot of sitting around the cottage watching the tide do its thing. The children made friends with a family in the neighbouring property through the universal language of shouting while kicking a ball, and I had a conversation with their mother about the best bakery in Kappeln that felt like I'd lived here for years. That's the thing about places like this, I think. The Ostseeresort is designed for this kind of holiday, the sort where the accommodation is comfortable enough that you don't need to be constantly escaping it, and the location is quiet enough that you stop needing to fill every hour.

By the second evening, we'd established our positions. My husband had claimed the terrace for his morning coffee ritual. The children had established a complex system of territory in the shared garden involving a rope swing I pretended not to worry about. I'd found my heron-watching spot. The sat nav sat in the car, sulking, while I used an actual paper map I'd found in the cottage drawer like some kind of historical reenactor.

I keep thinking about that wrong turn now, oddly. How something that felt like disaster at the time, with the children asking if we were in Denmark now and my husband's knuckles whitening on the steering wheel, became just part of the story before we'd even arrived. I'm not going to claim it was meant to be or any of that nonsense. It was annoying. But it was also, I don't know, humanising? A reminder that the best bits of family holidays aren't the seamless bits, the bits that look good in the brochure. They're the slightly chaotic bits, the navigational failures, the heron-watching, the left flip-flops, the coffee machine battles.

The Schlei doesn't care if you took the scenic route. The heron certainly doesn't. And sitting on that terrace as another golden evening settled over the fjord, watching my children argue good-naturedly about something I couldn't quite hear, I felt something I hadn't expected from a self-catering cottage break in northern Germany. I felt like we'd arrived somewhere that mattered, wrong turns and all.