I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I trusted my sat nav over my own eyes and ended up driving straight past the turning for Ewijk not once but twice. There I was, beetling along the dyke road with the kids in the back asking if we were nearly there yet for the fifteenth time, completely missing the modest little lane that led down to our cottage. The third pass was particularly mortifying because a friendly local on a bicycle actually waved and mouthed "again?" at me. I waved back with what I hoped looked like cheerful confidence rather than the hot-faced embarrassment I actually felt.

We had come to Gelderland for a proper family break, the sort where you self-cater, argue mildly over board games, and pretend that walking to the village shop counts as countryside exercise. The property was a traditional Dutch cottage, tucked between orchards and pastureland, and I will admit that my first glimpse of it through the windscreen did make me forgive the sat nav entirely. It sat there looking terribly pleased with itself, all whitewashed walls and a proper thatched roof that must have taken someone an absolute age to maintain. The garden was generous and slightly rambling, with a wooden terrace that had clearly seen many an evening of relaxed grilling and perhaps one too many glasses of local beer.

The key was in a lockbox, which I managed on the second attempt after dropping the code card into a flowerbed. The front door opened with that satisfying weight that old doors have, and we stepped into a kitchen that smelled faintly of wood polish and previous occupants' cooking. My daughter immediately claimed the bedroom with the sloped ceiling, my son investigated whether the television had any channels he recognised, and my partner and I stood in the middle of the living room doing that thing where you slowly rotate and take it all in. Beamed ceiling, decent-sized dining table, sofas that looked like they had hosted a thousand post-cycling naps. It felt immediately like somewhere you could properly settle into, not one of those pristine rentals where you are afraid to touch anything.

I made the mistake of announcing I would pop to the village for supplies before we had properly unpacked. Ewijk itself is small and unassuming, which is precisely its charm. I wandered to the local shop with a mental list and returned with approximately half of it, having been distracted by a display of stroopwafels and a chat with the shopkeeper about the weather, which she described as "typical" with a shrug that suggested this covered everything from glorious sunshine to horizontal rain. The walk back took me past neat brick houses and the occasional garden where someone was doing something purposeful with vegetables. Everything was flat in that satisfying Dutch way that makes you feel you can see tomorrow coming.

By evening we had established ourselves on that wooden terrace with bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine that cost less than it should have. The children were actually playing together without electronic intervention, something I had begun to think was mythological. A heron flew past at one point, slow and deliberate, and we all watched it in the comfortable silence of people who have stopped rushing for a moment. I thought about my three failed attempts at finding the place and decided that perhaps getting slightly lost was the proper beginning to a holiday like this. You cannot arrive somewhere gently if you are determined to barrel straight to it.