I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I put the wrong postcode into the sat nav and ended up in a cabbage field outside Rendsburg. There I was, arguing with a woman in a Volvo who clearly thought I was some sort of agricultural inspector, while my partner sat in the passenger seat pretending not to know me. Forty minutes later, we finally found the actual Ostseeresort Olpenitz, and I have never been so relieved to see a holiday home complex in my life.

The first person who properly welcomed us was Dieter, a wiry chap in his sixties who managed the key collection. He had that particular north German directness that initially feels like rudeness but quickly reveals itself as something far more valuable: genuine honesty. "You are the cabbage people," he announced, checking his clipboard. I started to explain, but he waved his hand dismissively. "Everyone gets lost here. Last week a family from Munich drove into the marina. The husband is still apologising." He handed over our keys with the solemnity of a man bestowing a great treasure, then spent twenty minutes explaining the bin system with the passion most people reserve for football or religion.

Our neighbour, a stout woman called Ute with a small dog that appeared to be mostly beard, appeared on our decking approximately six minutes after we arrived. She was wearing a dressing gown and wellington boots, which I initially thought might be some sort of Schleswig-Holstein fashion statement, but later learned was simply her "popping out" uniform. "You are English," she observed, which felt less like a question and more like a diagnosis. "I visited Blackpool once. It rained." She said this with tremendous satisfaction, as if she had personally arranged the weather to confirm her worldview. Within half an hour she had told us her entire life story, including her ex-husband's questionable fishing techniques and her daughter's disappointing career in marketing.

The marina itself became our evening ritual, not for the boats particularly, but for the people watching. There was Jorgen, a Danish retiree who had sailed the same thirty-mile stretch of coast for fifteen years and considered himself something of a local sage. He would hold court at the little harbourside cafe, dispensing opinions on everything from Brexit to the proper preparation of pickled herring. "The English," he told me one evening, leaning in conspiratorially, "you think you understand the sea because you have the Channel. The Channel is a puddle. This" - he gestured expansively at the Schlei fjord - "this requires respect." I nodded seriously, though I have never in my life felt anything approaching respect for a body of water.

What struck me most, perhaps, was how these brief encounters accumulated into something genuinely warming. The woman at the bakery who remembered my order by day three and threw in an extra pastry "for the cabbage journey." The teenage lad at the bike hire who explained the local cycle paths with such earnest detail that I felt guilty not writing it all down. Even the slightly terrifying man who cleaned the fish at the harbour every morning, who communicated entirely in grunts and meaningful gestures but once gave me a fillet of plaice that was honestly the best I have ever tasted.

By the end of the week, I realised something slightly uncomfortable about myself. I had arrived with the typical tourist's defensive posture, assuming these brief holiday friendships were essentially transactional, that everyone was playing a role. But Ute genuinely did not care whether I found her interesting; she simply found herself interesting and assumed, generously, that others might too. Dieter's bin lecture came from a place of profound civic pride. Jorgen's maritime lectures were not performance but pure, unfiltered enthusiasm.

We left on a grey morning, Ute waving from her window in full dressing-gown regalia, Dieter having presented us with a laminated guide to recycling that he had apparently prepared specially. I drove carefully past the cabbage field, smug in my knowledge of the correct route, and felt something I had not expected from a self-catering holiday in Schleswig-Holstein: a peculiar, slightly embarrassing fondness for a place and its people, whom I would almost certainly never see again, but who had, in their various odd ways, made me feel briefly and unexpectedly at home.