I should have known the satnav was up to no good when it tried to send me through what looked like a potato field just outside Meppel. Three hours into our drive from the ferry at Hoek van Holland, my partner Dave and I were already bickering about whose fault it was we had not bought a proper map. The mishap came five minutes later, when I confidently turned down a gravel track marked "Landleven" only to find myself nose-to-nose with a very unimpressed-looking pony. It was not a through road. It was not even a road. It was someone's driveway, and that someone was now waving at us from their kitchen window with what I can only describe as theatrical Dutch patience.

By the time we actually found the Vledder, I was ready to abandon the car in a ditch and walk the rest of the way. But then we turned onto the proper lane, and there it was: a proper Drenthe farmhouse conversion with thatched roofing and whitewashed walls, sitting among trees with a garden that looked like it had been arranged by someone who genuinely understood the concept of "chilling out."

The owners had left the key in a wooden box with a combination lock, which Dave failed to open three times because he was still laughing about the pony incident. Inside, the place smelled of pine and old beams. The ceiling in the main bedroom was so low that Dave, who is six foot two, immediately banged his head on a beam and swore creatively. I laughed, then did exactly the same thing ten minutes later while admiring the view from the window. Karma, I suppose.

We had arrived on one of those May days when the weather cannot make up its mind. The morning had been glorious sunshine, but by the time we unloaded the car, grey clouds were massing like spectators at a football match. Our plan had been ambitious and, in retrospect, completely ridiculous: a ten-mile hike through the Drents-Friese Wold, followed by a picnic, followed by what Dave called "general wandering about in nature."

The Wold was only a few miles away, accessible by a cycle path we could walk along from the village. We set off the next morning in shorts and optimism, armed with a packet of stroopwafels and a bottle of water each. For two hours, it was genuinely magical. The heathland was that particular purple-brown colour you only get in this part of the Netherlands, and the pine forests were so still you could hear your own footsteps on the sandy paths. We saw a deer. Dave tried to take a photograph and fell backwards into a bush. I did not help him up immediately because I was crying with laughter.

Then the weather turned. Not gradually, not politely, but with the sudden enthusiasm of a toddler having a tantrum. One moment we were squinting in sunshine; the next, hailstones the size of small peas were bouncing off Dave's bald head and I was trying to use a stroopwafel packet as an improvised umbrella. We sheltered under a Scots pine that offered approximately no protection whatsoever, huddled together like the world's most pathetic woodland creatures, and waited it out.

The hail stopped. The sun returned. We continued, damp and chastened, for another hour before admitting defeat and turning back. By the time we reached the Vledder, we were both sunburned and slightly hypothermic in different places, which I did not think was medically possible.

That evening, we sat in the garden with mugs of tea and watched the swallows. Dave's legs were covered in nettle stings. My shoes were still making squelching noises. We had walked perhaps four miles of our planned ten, spent twenty minutes hiding from ice from the sky, and achieved none of the "serious hiking" we had imagined.

I found myself thinking, as the light faded over the Drenthe landscape, that this was probably exactly what we needed. The pony, the hail, the stroopwafel umbrella, the nettles. Not the polished Instagram version of a walking holiday, but the real, slightly absurd experience of being somewhere properly rural with weather that does not care about your plans.

We stayed a week. The sun came back properly the next day, and we did manage longer walks through the heath and along the forest trails, though we never again attempted ten miles in shorts without checking the forecast. The Vledder became our base for smaller, more sensible adventures: morning strolls to the village for bread, afternoon wanders through the Wold with actual waterproofs packed, evening drinks in that garden watching the light change over the trees.

On our last morning, I stood in the low-ceilinged bedroom, ducked automatically under the beam, and felt genuinely sad to be leaving. Dave was outside loading the car, presumably having one last conversation with the pony, who had become something of a legend in our personal mythology.

We drove back to the ferry without getting lost once, which felt like a small miracle. But I think part of me was already planning when we might return, perhaps with a proper map, definitely with better shoes, and absolutely with no expectations of the weather behaving itself. Some holidays teach you things you did not know you needed to learn. This one taught me that getting slightly lost, slightly hailed on, and slightly sunburned all in the same afternoon is not failure. It is just Drenthe being Drenthe, and you being lucky enough to experience it.