I'd never driven to Friesland before, and if I'm honest, I wasn't entirely sure where it was until about three weeks before we left. Somewhere north, I thought. Flat. Windmills, maybe? My partner did the booking, which meant I did the driving, and by the time we'd crawled up through Belgium and into the Netherlands, I'd developed a profound hatred of roundabouts and a cramp in my left calf that felt personal.

The sat nav started getting creative somewhere past Zwolle. "Turn left," it commanded, into what appeared to be a canal. I didn't turn left. The sat nav sulked, recalculated, and sent us down a road so narrow I had to fold the wing mirrors in. That's when the mishap happened. We'd stopped at a supermarket in Heerenveen for supplies, and in my enthusiasm to stretch my legs, I'd managed to leave the bag of cheese on the roof. Not just any cheese, mind you, a massive wedge of aged Edam that my partner had been specifically excited about. We discovered this twenty minutes later when a cyclist flagged us down, holding the bag aloft like a trophy. He didn't speak English, I don't speak Dutch, but we understood each other perfectly. The cheese was slightly concave on one side. We ate it anyway.

Oosterwolde itself appeared suddenly, as these places do, after a stretch of nothing but fields and the occasional sheep giving you a look. The village has that particular Dutch quality of being extremely tidy without seeming to try. Even the puddles looked organised. Our holiday home sat on the edge of things, backing onto woodland that the listing had promised and that actually existed, which is always a small miracle in itself.

The key was in a lockbox, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to open it while my partner stood with her arms crossed, offering unhelpful commentary about reading the instructions. When it finally clicked, we stepped inside to that particular silence of an empty house, the kind that makes you speak in whispers for no reason. The place smelled of wood and something faintly citrus, clean without being sterile. I immediately walked into a coffee table that I hadn't seen, which my partner found hilarious and I pretended not to mind.

The living area opened onto a terrace through sliding doors, and I spent a solid five minutes just standing there, watching nothing happen in the garden. A blackbird landed on the fence, looked at me, decided I was uninteresting, and left. It was perfect. The kitchen was one of those compact Dutch arrangements where everything fits into everything else, and I found myself opening cupboards just to see where the microwave was hiding. Third door on the left, if you're wondering, behind a panel that looked decorative.

My partner had wandered upstairs and I heard her laugh, the good kind, so I followed. The bedroom windows looked out over the trees, and the light was doing that golden thing it does in late afternoon when the world seems to have been slightly filtered for your personal enjoyment. She pointed out that I'd been standing with my mouth slightly open, which I deny, and we both just stood there for a moment, tired and cheesy and suddenly very aware that we had nothing to do for a week.

I went back down to bring in the rest of the luggage, including our dented Edam, and noticed for the first time how quiet it was. Not the absence of sound, exactly, but the presence of different ones: distant birds, wind in the trees, a tractor somewhere far enough away to be charming rather than annoying. I stood in the driveway with a suitcase in each hand, feeling the particular ache of a long journey starting to fade, and thought about how I'd spent six hours dreading arrival, worrying about the drive, the cheese, whether the place would match the photos, and now here I was, already slightly in love with a village I'd known for twenty minutes.

My partner appeared at the door with two cups of tea she'd somehow produced from the mysterious kitchen, and we sat on the terrace as the light faded, not talking much, watching the sky go through its evening routine. The cheese, despite its adventure, tasted excellent. Some things, I decided, are worth the occasional mishap.