I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to put diesel in a petrol hire car at Hamburg Airport. The attendant, a man whose patience clearly rivalled that of a primary school teacher on sports day, tapped the little green sticker by the fuel cap and said, "Nein, mein Freund" with the weariness of someone who had seen this exact scene roughly four thousand times before. I smiled, he sighed, and forty minutes later we were finally pointing north towards Schleswig-Holstein with a tank of the correct fuel and my dignity hanging by a thread.

The Ostseeresort Olpenitz sits on a slender peninsula where the Schlei fjord meets the Baltic, and pulling up to our timber-framed holiday home, I felt that particular satisfaction of somewhere that looks precisely as advertised. The key safe code worked first time, which I took as cosmic compensation for the petrol station debacle. My partner gave me a look that said she was still mentally calculating how much a misfuel would have cost us, but the view from the decking softened her considerably. Reeds whispered in the wind, sailboats bobbed at anchor, and somewhere a herring gull announced itself with theatrical volume.

We had resolved to eat properly on this trip. Not "properly" in the sense of white tablecloths and sommeliers, but properly in the sense of local, seasonal, and cooked by us whenever possible. The kitchen at the resort was compact but thoughtfully arranged, and I had grand plans of transforming the local catch into something approaching competence.

The first morning, we drove the ten minutes to Kappeln's Saturday market, which spreads along the harbour with the cheerful chaos of anywhere that still believes in weighing produce by hand and knowing your fishmonger by name. I bought smoked fish from a man whose family had been smoking it for generations, or so his sign claimed, and who wrapped my eel in paper with the ceremony of a jeweller presenting an engagement ring. We also acquired potatoes that still wore their soil proudly, butter the colour of custard, and bread from a bakery whose queue suggested either exceptional quality or an extremely slow serving system. It was, mercifully, the former.

That evening I attempted to recreate something I had once eaten in a Hamburg restaurant. The smoked eel sat atop my improvised potato salad like a patient king waiting to see what his subject would do next. What I produced was not identical to my memory, nor was it entirely unsuccessful. The potatoes were slightly underdone, having rebelled against my timing, and the dressing had more vinegar than intended because I misread a label. We ate it on the decking with a bottle of Riesling from a supermarket in Eckernforde, and I decided that imperfection eaten outdoors tastes significantly better than perfection in a dining room.

The resort's own restaurant, Pier 67, became our fallback for evenings when cooking felt like an unnecessary act of hubris. Their fish soup, thick with saffron and properly stocked with local catch, became something of an obsession. I tried to identify the components, leaning over the bowl like a wine taster, which my partner found either endearing or irritating depending on her hunger level. The local beer, Flensburger, accompanied most meals with its distinctive flip-top cap that I collected in a jar with the vague intention of some future craft project I will never begin.

We found a pub in Kappeln called Zum Hafen, or something similarly nautical, where the landlord spoke enough English to understand my request for "whatever you're drinking yourself" and produced a dark beer that tasted of burnt caramel and contentment. The regulars examined us with the brief curiosity afforded to obvious tourists, then returned to their conversations about tides and football with the comfortable rhythm of people who have known each other since school.

My most ambitious cooking attempt came on our fourth day. I had purchased fresh plaice from a harbour-side seller in Olpenitz itself, a transaction conducted largely through pointing and hopeful smiles. The fish was undeniably beautiful, flat and pale with those distinctive orange spots. I had read somewhere that the traditional preparation involved butter, lemon, and not much else, which suited my abilities. What I had not adequately considered was the process of filleting, which I approached with the confidence of someone who had watched approximately one-third of an online tutorial. The result was more mangled than masterful, though once pan-fried with sufficient butter, the structural deficiencies became less apparent. We ate it with boiled potatoes and a green salad from the resort's modest herb garden, and I felt genuinely pleased with myself until I found a small bone in my final mouthful.

The local bakeries became our morning ritual, each one slightly different in its specialities. One in Schuby did exceptional Franzbrotchen, that peculiar cinnamon-scented pastry that Hamburg claims but which tastes equally excellent this far north. Another in Arnis produced rye bread so dense it could serve as a doorstop, which we sliced thinly and topped with the smoked fish we had taken to buying in quantity.

By our final evening, I had accumulated a small collection of local foodstuffs that would never fit in our luggage: a jar of honey from Schuby, more smoked fish than was strictly sensible, and a bottle of schnapps purchased after a particularly convivial afternoon at the resort's bar. We cooked a final meal of simple sausages from the market, fried potatoes with onions, and a salad that I finally managed to dress correctly after a week of practice. We opened a second bottle of Riesling and watched the light fade over the Schlei, and I thought about how holidays are measured not in perfect moments but in accumulated small satisfactions: the correct fuel in the car, the fish soup that needed no improvement, the bone that was, after all, only a small one.

The morning we left, I made one final attempt at coffee in the resort's French press, which I had never quite mastered despite seven days of practice. It was slightly too strong and slightly too bitter, and I drank it on the decking watching a heron stalk through the reeds with the patience I had never quite learned myself. My partner packed the car with considerably more competence than I had shown at the petrol pump, and we drove south towards Hamburg with the windows down and the smell of the Baltic fading in the rearview mirror.