I have never been so relieved to see a bungalow in my entire life. Twelve hours after leaving Milton Keynes, three wrong turns around Den Bosch, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted Kerkdriel was "arriving now" somewhere in the middle of a canal, I finally crunched onto the gravel drive of our little holiday home in Gelderland. My partner sat in silence, which I have learned to interpret as a temporary ceasefire rather than actual peace.

The mishap that nearly finished us off happened at a petrol station somewhere past Eindhoven. I had confidently strode inside, grabbed two coffees and what I believed were cheese sandwiches, and returned to the car triumphantly. Twenty minutes later, mid-motorway, we discovered I had purchased something called "ontbijtkoek" - a sort of dense gingerbread affair - and two pots of vla, which is essentially custard in a pot. Try eating that at seventy miles an hour without a spoon. My partner's expression as she peeled back the foil lid still haunts me. We laughed about it eventually. Well, she laughed. I made a mental note to learn Dutch food packaging before our next trip, or at least pack a spoon.

By the time we reached the Maasdijk area, the flat Dutch landscape had worked its strange magic on me. The endless green fields, the straight roads with their perfect drainage ditches, the occasional cow standing in poses of profound philosophical thought - it all felt impossibly orderly after the chaos of British motorways. I found myself slowing down just to watch a heron standing in a field, which my partner pointed out was probably not the behaviour of someone who had just driven across four countries.

The bungalow itself sat in a quiet residential corner of Kerkdriel, a village that seems to exist in that pleasant Dutch hinterland between proper countryside and somewhere you might actually find a decent supermarket. Our first impression, fumbling with the key safe while balancing the remains of our custard pots, was of a compact, neatly presented little house with a garden that looked like someone had recently hoovered it. The Dutch do not mess about with their gardens. Ours had a small patio, some extremely well-behaved shrubs, and a view of neighbouring bungalows that managed to feel private rather than overlooked.

Inside, the place smelled of clean linen and that particular holiday rental scent of someone having recently polished everything including things I would never think to polish. The living area opened into a small kitchen that immediately made me want to cook something ambitious involving local ingredients, despite the fact that I cannot cook and our shopping currently consisted of gingerbread and custard. There was a dining table, a sofa that looked like it had never been sat in by anyone over twelve stone, and sliding doors onto that terrifyingly tidy garden.

I stood there with my bag still on my shoulder, suddenly aware that I had not properly stood up for about six hours, and felt something shift. The drive, the sat nav nonsense, the custard incident - it all seemed to belong to a different, more frantic version of myself. The bungalow demanded a slower pace. It practically insisted on it.

My partner had already located the kettle, which I took as genuine forgiveness. We stood in that neat little kitchen, drinking tea made with Dutch teabags that tasted slightly different in a way I could not identify, and watched the evening light fall across the garden. Someone cycled past outside, very slowly, with a dog in a basket. A church bell rang somewhere, though whether it was actually Kerkdriel's church or one from a neighbouring village I could not tell. Everything felt very still, very green, very deliberately calm.

I thought about all the holidays where I had arrived exhausted and immediately tried to do everything, see everything, post everything. This little bungalow in Gelderland, with its polished surfaces and its custard-eating owner, seemed to be suggesting a different approach. I was not sure I was capable of it, but for that first evening, I was willing to try.

The heron in the field had been right. Some things are worth slowing down for.