I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving car window quite so badly either. The journey to our little place in Oosterwolde started well enough, smooth sailing down from the ferry at Hook of Holland, windows down, Dutch radio playing something inexplicably cheerful at nine in the morning. Then somewhere past Heerenveen, confidence took over. I spotted a sign for a shortcut, ignored the polite Australian lady telling me to continue straight, and promptly found myself at the end of a farm track staring at a very unimpressed Friesian cow. My wife did that thing where she breathes out slowly through her nose. The children found it hilarious, naturally. Twenty minutes of reversing past identical ditches later, we were back where we started, slightly wiser and significantly more humble.

The approach to Oosterwolde itself made up for everything. Friesland does this remarkable thing where the landscape flattens out so completely that the sky becomes the main event. Great sweeping bowls of cloud, light hitting the fields in bands, and everywhere these narrow waterways glinting between the grass. We crossed a tiny bridge, barely wide enough for our estate car, and suddenly there it was: our cottage for the week, tucked behind a proper old farmhouse with a thatched roof you could practically hear sighing with contentment.

I will admit to a particular weakness for holiday cottage photos that promise rustic charm and deliver MDF panelling. This place, mercifully, was the genuine article. The key was under a flowerpot, which felt deliciously illicit, and the door opened with a satisfying weight to it. Inside smelled of beeswax and something else, something I eventually identified as the particular stillness of a house that has been properly aired. The kitchen had a proper range, the sort my grandmother would have recognised, and a table that had clearly hosted decades of card games and bread-breaking. My youngest immediately claimed the window seat, pressing her nose against the glass to watch a tractor trundling past in the distance.

The mishap of the morning meant we arrived later than planned, so our first proper exploration was the garden at golden hour. It was not grand, not in the English sense, but it was generous. A proper lawn giving way to a little orchard, apple trees heavy with fruit not quite ready, and beyond that a meadow that seemed to go on forever until you realised it was bordered by one of those characteristic Friesland waterways. My wife found a hammock strung between two trees and executed the manoeuvre women everywhere have perfected, the one where they lower themselves in with dignity while men simply collapse and hope for the best. I collapsed. It held. We lay there listening to nothing much at all, which was precisely the point.

The children discovered the badminton set in the shed, if discovered is the right word for something they were never going to leave alone. The rackets were wooden, slightly warped, the shuttlecock feathers worn to wisps. They played with the chaotic enthusiasm of children who have forgotten what boredom feels like, while I made tea on the proper stove and burned my thumb only slightly. We ate bread and cheese from the little shop in the village, simple stuff that tasted of somewhere specific, and watched the light change over the flat fields until the mosquitoes finally drove us inside.

That first evening, I found myself standing at the kitchen window washing up in the old-fashioned way, no dishwasher here, watching bats dart above the meadow. My wife was reading aloud to the children in the other room, something about a dog, their laughter interrupting her periodically. I thought about the cow, the wrong turn, the brief flash of temper when the track ended in mud. It seemed funny now, almost necessary. You need a small disaster to earn the calm, perhaps. To notice it properly.

We had a week of this ahead of us. Walks to the village for morning bread, perhaps a paddle in the nearby lake if the weather held, definitely more badminton with those hopeless shuttlecocks. Nothing ambitious. Nothing requiring a sat nav at all. I dried my hands on a towel that had seen better decades and went through to join my family, leaving the window open to the Friesland night.