I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked suspiciously like someone's back garden in Kappeln. There I was, white-knuckling the steering wheel down yet another narrow lane flanked by cow parsley and existential dread, convinced I'd somehow crossed into a parallel universe where postcodes were merely decorative suggestions.

The mishap, though. Oh, the mishap. We'd stopped at a petrol station just outside Eckernforde for the essentials: bread, milk, and a loo roll situation that had become frankly urgent after three hours on the Autobahn. I emerged triumphant with supplies, flung open the car door with perhaps too much Germanic enthusiasm, and watched in slow-motion horror as my house keys complete with the NOVASOL key safe code tag sailed through the air and landed with a plop in a drainage ditch. My partner's face went through several emotions I can only describe as "the five stages of grief, accelerated." There we were, two grown adults, fishing around in murky water with a petrol station sandwich wrapper on a stick while a local man filled his diesel tank with the solemn expression of someone witnessing British competence firsthand.

By the time we actually reached Schonhagen Strand, I was in that peculiar state of frazzled delirium where everything either makes you laugh or weep. The first glimpse of the place, though, stopped me mid-mutter. The holiday home sat among similar wooden cottages in that restrained, functional Scandinavian style the Germans do so well, all pale cladding and sensible angles, with the Baltic glinting beyond the dunes like a promise someone actually intended to keep.

I fumbled the key safe with damp fingers still faintly aromatic of ditch water, and the door swung open to that particular hush of a seaside let in late afternoon. The smell hit first: pine, faint salt, and the ghost of someone else's cleaning products. The living area was open-plan in that practical way, kitchen running along one wall with the sort of oven that looks like it could survive a nuclear event, sofa facing sliding doors that framed a view I immediately decided forgave everything.

I dumped our bags with the grace of a collapsing wardrobe and made straight for those doors. The little terrace had two chairs and a table positioned with mathematical precision to catch evening light. Beyond, the path wound through marram grass toward the beach. I could hear the sea proper now, not loud but insistent, that rhythmic hush that makes your shoulders drop without permission.

My partner emerged from inspecting the bedrooms looking almost peaceful, which for someone who'd spent twenty minutes holding my coat while I committed minor acts of drainage vandalism was saying something. "There's a bunk bed," he said, with the wonder of a man who hadn't expected to regress to childhood holidays. The place had that particular quality of German holiday rentals: nothing fancy, everything adequate, the quiet confidence of somewhere that knows its job is being pleasant without trying too hard.

I stood there on that terrace, still slightly damp of sock and dignity, watching the light turn the Baltic that particular pale green it does in late afternoon. The sat nav chaos, the key catastrophe, the sandwich wrapper fishing expedition - it all compressed into something already fond, already funny in the telling. There's something about arrival at the coast, isn't there? However messy the getting there, however undignified the final hundred metres, that first breath of proper sea air resets something fundamental.

We never did find out whose garden we'd nearly driven through. Some mysteries, like the lingering smell of ditch water, are perhaps best left to the Schleswig-Holstein evening.