I should have known the sat-nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through what looked like someone's back garden just outside Leeuwarden. There I was, white-knuckling the steering wheel, convinced I'd be explaining myself to a Dutch farmer and his very unimpressed dog. Turns out the road did exist, it was just narrower than my optimism.

The journey up from the ferry at Hook of Holland had been mostly plain sailing, if you ignore my husband Mark's increasingly desperate attempts to pronounce the place names correctly. "Workum," he'd announced confidently at one point, rhyming it with "circum." Our teenage daughter didn't even look up from her phone, which in fourteen-year-old speak meant absolute devastation.

We'd chosen Workum partly because we'd heard it was the quieter cousin of some of the bigger Frisian towns, and partly because the cottage looked properly old-school Dutch on the website. None of that glass-and-steel business. Give me wonky rooflines and a garden you can actually sit in.

The mishap came as we finally crawled into the town itself. I'd been so busy admiring the traditional Frisian architecture, all those gabled facades and neat little canals, that I completely missed the turning to our lane. Mark was mid-sentence about stopping for coffee when I did what can only be described as an extremely optimistic three-point turn on a road built for horses and optimistic cyclists. A local on a bicycle watched the whole performance with the kind of patient expression that suggested he'd seen worse. Probably from British tourists specifically.

The cottage itself sat on a proper residential street, the sort where you can imagine neighbours chatting over fences and someone always knowing someone else's business in the best possible way. Ours was the one with the climbing something-or-other up the front and a garden that clearly belonged to someone who actually gardened, rather than just maintaining a theoretical outdoor space.

Stepping inside felt like walking into someone's well-loved home rather than a rental property, which I mean as the highest compliment. The wooden beams did that thing where they look like they might be original but you're too polite to ask. The kitchen had clearly been cooked in, properly, not just microwaved. I ran my hand along the dining table and could almost feel the family meals that had happened there, the card games, the probably-arguments about whose turn it was to wash up.

Mark had already disappeared to investigate the garden, because men and outdoor spaces have a magnetic relationship I will never fully understand. I heard him laugh at something, and when I joined him he was pointing at a small shed that looked like it might once have been a proper outbuilding and was now doing excellent service as a bike storage situation. "We could cycle to the IJsselmeer," he said, with the enthusiasm of someone who had not cycled anywhere meaningful in approximately fifteen years.

I didn't have the heart to mention this yet. There would be time for reality later. For now, I was happy to stand in that unexpectedly peaceful garden, listening to a dog bark somewhere a few gardens over, smelling something faintly floral that I couldn't identify, and feeling the particular satisfaction of having arrived somewhere that already felt like it might let you properly unwind.

Our daughter emerged from her phone-induced coma long enough to declare the Wi-Fi acceptable and the bedroom "actually quite big," which from her is roughly equivalent to a five-star review in a national newspaper.

I made tea with the funny little kettle, because some rituals survive any journey, and stood at the kitchen window watching a cat pick its way along the back fence with the confidence of someone who owned the place. The sat-nav debacle, the pronunciation crimes, the questionable three-point turn, all of it faded into the particular pleasure of being somewhere new that already felt like somewhere you could belong, at least for a little while.

Mark appeared at my elbow, still banging on about bicycles. I poured him a cup and let him talk. The IJsselmeer could wait until tomorrow, and probably the day after that if I had anything to do with it.