I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's beet field. There I was, trundling through Thuringia in a hired Vauxhall, convinced I was taking the scenic route to Goldlauter-Heidersbach, when the tarmac simply gave up and turned to mud. October in this part of Germany, as I was rapidly discovering, does not forgive overconfidence in technology.

The mishap itself was almost embarrassingly predictable. I had stopped to photograph a particularly handsome clutch of hay bales, golden against the low afternoon sun, and managed to lock the keys in the boot. There I stood, surrounded by the faint smell of turnips and the distant sound of a tractor, performing a sort of helpless dance in a puddle. A farmer emerged from a corrugated shed, took in the scene with the weary patience of someone who has seen many such idiots, and produced a wire coat hanger from his overalls. We communicated in broken German, expressive hand gestures, and shared laughter at my expense. Within ten minutes I was back on the road, slightly mud-splattered and significantly humbled.

By the time I reached the holiday home in Goldlauter-Heidersbach, the light was doing that magical autumn thing where everything looks slightly unreal, as though someone has turned up the saturation. The property sat at the edge of the village, and the first thing that struck me was how the season had dressed it. The wooden balcony was strewn with chestnut leaves, and someone, presumably the owner, had arranged pumpkins of various sizes along the garden path with the casual artistry of someone who knows exactly how photogenic their doorstep looks in October.

I stepped inside to that particular hush that wooden houses seem to absorb in autumn. The heating had been left on low, and the smell of pine and something faintly cinnamon-like, perhaps from a previous guest's baking, wrapped around me like a blanket. I dumped my bags and went straight to the balcony, drawn by the light. The garden sloped down toward a small stream, barely audible now with the reduced water flow of late autumn, and beyond that rose the wooded slopes of the Thuringian Forest in their full seasonal regalia. Beech and oak and the occasional stand of spruce made a patchwork of rust and copper and deep green that seemed almost too perfectly arranged.

The temperature was dropping fast, that sharp October drop that comes with sunset in this part of Germany. I could see my breath. I should have brought the thicker jumper, I thought, the one I had optimistically left in Manchester assuming autumn in continental Europe would be somehow milder. It is not. Thuringian autumn is proper autumn, committed autumn, the kind that makes you grateful for proper heating and a decent duvet.

I ventured out before full dark, needing provisions, and found the village shop already closed, as village shops sensibly are by six. The bakery, though, was still doing brisk trade in the morning's leftover rolls and some rather excellent-looking apple cake. I bought both, along with a jar of local honey that the woman behind the counter assured me came from hives no more than two kilometres away. The bees, she explained, had had a good late season on the heather. Everything in conversation here came back to the season, to what the weather was doing, to how the harvest had been. It was impossible not to be aware of time's passage, of the wheel of the year turning visibly in front of you.

Walking back, the street lamps were coming on, casting that particular orange glow that makes autumn evenings feel like childhood. Wood smoke drifted from somewhere, that most evocative of seasonal smells. I passed a garden where someone was still stubbornly tending Brussels sprouts in the gathering dark, and another where the last apples were being gathered into baskets, the tree nearly bare now.

Back at the house, I made tea with the inadequate milk I had brought from England, sat on the sofa with the apple cake, and watched the last light fail completely beyond the black shapes of the trees. The season had already begun to teach me something about slowing down, about paying attention to small rhythms, about not trusting Sat Navs in beet fields. I had arrived, slightly battered, slightly wiser, and entirely ready to let Thuringian autumn do whatever it intended to do with me.