I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's patient voice as I was driving up to Friesland. Three hours from the Eurotunnel, my mate Dave and I were already bickering about whose turn it was to choose the music when I missed the turning for Sumar. Not just missed it. Glided past it while confidently telling Dave, "Yeah, this looks right," as we sailed towards what turned out to be someone's rather aggressive goose farm. The sat nav, in that maddeningly calm way, said "recalculating" about six times before Dave pointed out we'd added twenty minutes to a journey that already felt like we'd driven to the moon.

The Sumar itself, when we finally found it, was one of those proper Frisian holiday homes with the distinctive thatched roof and more windows than seemed strictly necessary. I was still laughing at myself, lugging a suitcase through the front door while Dave filmed the whole thing for posterity, when our neighbour appeared over the hedge. This was Sietse, seventy-odd, wearing clogs that looked older than my dad and a cap that had seen better decades.

"You the English?" he called out, not waiting for an answer. "Your predecessor drove into the ditch there in March. You did better. Only the geese."

I liked him immediately.

That first evening, Dave and I walked to the village pub, which turned out to be less a pub and more someone's front room that happened to serve beer. The owner, a woman called Trijntje who introduced herself by correcting my pronunciation three times, took our order while explaining she'd lived in Sumar her entire life and couldn't understand why anyone would holiday somewhere with "no mountain, no beach, no disco." She said this with evident pride.

"So why do you stay?" Dave asked, proving he sometimes has moments of genuine insight.

Trijntje looked at him like he'd asked why she kept breathing. "Because everyone knows my name," she said. "And I know which cow belongs to who."

We spent the next hour being introduced to various locals who wandered in for "just one" that inevitably became three. There was Harm, who farmed sheep and had opinions about Brexit that he delivered in a Frisian-English hybrid I understood perhaps forty percent of, though his gestures made the general point clear enough. There was Liesbeth, retired teacher, who insisted on testing my Dutch numbers by making me order rounds, then laughed openly at my pronunciation of "vier." I started to suspect she was ordering complicated drinks on purpose.

The gentle self-reflection crept in around my third beer, watching Dave attempt to explain cricket to a deeply sceptical Sietse, who kept interrupting with "but why?" in increasingly incredulous tones. I realised I'd spent months planning holidays around doing things, ticking boxes, collecting experiences like stamps. Here was a village of perhaps four hundred people, in a province most Brits couldn't place on a map, and I was having more genuine conversation in one evening than I'd managed in entire city breaks.

Sietse's wife Joke appeared at some point, apparently sent to retrieve him, and ended up staying for two hours telling us about the Elfstedentocht, the legendary ice-skating race that hasn't happened since 1997 because the canals won't freeze properly anymore. She described it with such vivid longing that I found myself wishing for impossible cold, just so she could have it back.

Walking back to the cottage that night, slightly unsteady on the unlit lane, Dave observed that we'd spoken to more strangers in five hours than we typically managed in five months in London. He wasn't wrong. There's something about a place small enough that anonymity isn't an option, where Trijntje remembers your drink order and Sietse expects you over the hedge each morning for a progress report on your holiday incompetence.

I still can't pronounce Sumar properly. Joke tried to teach me three times, laughing each attempt back at me. I'll be practising before we return, though. Some conversations deserve the effort of getting the name right.