I should have known the sat nav was up to no good when it tried to send us through what looked distinctly like someone's beet field. There we were, two hours out of Amsterdam, three kids in the back questioning every life choice that led them to this Renault Scenic, and my wife Helen quietly folding the map she'd insisted on bringing "just in case." The case, apparently, had arrived.

The mishap came at a roundabout near Assen. I took the exit marked Meppen with the confidence of a man who'd done absolutely no research beyond clicking "book now" during a Tuesday night scroll. Ten minutes of increasingly narrow lanes later, we found ourselves behind a tractor moving at what I can only describe as geological speed. The driver, a chap in overalls who looked about ninety, waved cheerfully as if this were entirely normal. In Drenthe, I would learn, it absolutely is.

We finally spotted the place down a sandy track bordered by oak trees that looked older than the concept of the weekend. The cottage sat there like something from a children's storybook, all dark timber and steep roof, with a proper thatched section that Helen immediately decided was "characterful" and I privately hoped was not about to deposit itself on our heads during the night.

The key was in a lockbox, which sounds straightforward until you realise you've been sent the code for a completely different property somewhere called Diever, roughly twenty minutes west. I spent a good ten minutes jabbing numbers while the youngest started doing that particular whine that travels up your spine. Helen, saint that she is, rang the letting company and somehow maintained her composure while a very patient Dutch woman explained that "Meppen" and "Diever" were, in fact, different places. Who knew?

The door opened onto that particular smell of old wood and recent cleaning that makes you instantly relax your shoulders. The living room was all beams and squishy sofas arranged around a wood-burning stove that the kids immediately claimed as "theirs" despite having no idea how to operate it. The kitchen had one of those proper farmhouse tables where you know you're going to end up playing cards at ten o'clock at night, slightly too much wine in, arguing about the rules of Uno.

I unpacked badly, as is my tradition, leaving a trail of bags through the hallway while Helen organised with military precision. The back door led to a garden that melted into fields without any fussy fence to mark where one ended and the other began. A heron stood in the long grass like a disappointed headmaster. We stared at each other. I lost the staring competition.

By teatime we'd established that the nearest shop was a ten-minute drive, that the local bread was suspiciously good, and that the children had already discovered a rope swing over a drainage ditch that would feature heavily in my anxiety dreams for the next week. We ate cheese and apples at that farmhouse table, curtains open to the fading light, and nobody mentioned phones or school or the various obligations waiting back home.

That first evening, I caught myself standing at the kitchen window with a cup of tea I hadn't finished, just watching the sky do that slow Dutch darkening where the blue seems to last forever. Helen came and stood beside me, not saying anything. The kids were laughing about something in the garden, probably the rope swing, probably something that would require plasters later.

We'd got here by accident, almost literally. Wrong turn, wrong code, wrong assumption that we knew where we were going. But sitting in that cottage as the heron finally flapped off into the dusk, I felt the particular relief of realising that being slightly lost can sometimes land you exactly where you needed to be.