I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I put the postcode into the sat nav and it directed me to a field of very unimpressed cows somewhere outside Rendsburg. Three U-turns, one heated debate about whose fault it was, and a hastily purchased road map from a petrol station later, we finally found the actual turn-off for Schoenhagen Strand. My partner maintains to this day that I misread a five and an eight. I maintain that German country roads are deliberately designed to test marriages.

The cottage itself appeared through the pine trees like something from a brochure, which of course made me immediately suspicious. I have stayed in enough self-catering places to know that "charming coastal retreat" often translates to "mould with a view." But this one, a proper timber-framed affair with a steep roof and a deck that practically begged for a morning coffee, looked genuinely promising. The key was in a lockbox, which I fumbled with for an embarrassing length of time while my children provided a running commentary on my incompetence.

Stepping inside, the first thing that hit me was the smell of pine and salt air, which is exactly what you want from a Schleswig-Holstein beach cottage and absolutely not what I expected. The living area had one of those wood-burning stoves that make you feel instantly more outdoorsy than you actually are, and enormous windows looking out towards the Baltic. My daughter immediately claimed the loft bedroom, which involved a ladder she was technically too young for but too determined to be denied. My son discovered the television and asked, with genuine confusion, why there were only German channels. I explained that we were, in fact, in Germany. He looked at me as if I had personally arranged this betrayal.

The kitchen was compact in that efficient German way where everything has a specific drawer and woe betide anyone who puts the cheese grater in the wrong one. I opened the fridge and felt an immediate responsibility to fill it with local things, though at that precise moment I would have settled for anything that was not a service station sandwich. We had driven past enough farm shops and smokehouses on our accidental tour of rural Schleswig-Holstein to know that proper provisioning was possible. The plan, loosely formed, was to cook simple things and eat them on that deck while pretending we were the sort of family who did this regularly.

The real moment came when I stepped onto the sand proper, perhaps fifty metres from the cottage door. The beach at Schoenhagen is not the dramatic cliff affair you get further up the coast, but a proper family strand, wide and flat with pale sand and those distinctive wooden breakwaters that make the Baltic feel so different from anywhere British. The water was that particular grey-green that promises it will be freezing regardless of season, and indeed it was. My children ran in up to their knees, shrieked, and ran out again. I stood there with my toes just barely submerged, feeling smug about my superior impulse control, until a wave caught me unexpectedly and I performed an undignified little hop that my partner found hilarious.

That evening, with the stove finally lit after I had made a complete hash of the kindling arrangement, I sat on the slightly too firm sofa with a cup of tea that tasted of the local water and watched my family argue about which board game to not finish. The windows had steamed up. Someone had already lost a flip-flop to the sea. I had sand in places I did not know I possessed. And I thought, with the kind of clarity that only comes after minor travel chaos, that this was exactly what we had needed. Not perfection. Just this particular, slightly chaotic, pine-scented version of peace.