I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through a field of very unimpressed-looking Friesians. Six hours from Hull, two ferries, one argument about whether we should have just flown to Amsterdam, and there I was, crawling down a dirt track in Gelderland with my partner doing that sharp intake of breath that means I have definitely done something wrong.

The mishap, when it came, was almost embarrassingly small. I had been braced for a puncture, a missed ferry, perhaps accidentally insulting a Dutch customs officer with my GCSE German. Instead, I got out of the car at what I thought was our holiday cottage, stretched my legs with theatrical exhaustion, and confidently tried the key in the door of what turned out to be a very nice-looking garden shed belonging to a bemused local chap who was pruning his roses. Wrong house. Wrong street, technically. The actual property was two hundred yards further on, hidden behind a proper hedge like it was trying to avoid me. I laughed, the gardener laughed, my partner did not laugh. We drove the remaining distance in what I can only describe as a thoughtful silence.

But then we turned into the proper driveway, and something shifted. The cottage sat there looking thoroughly pleased with itself, all red brick and white trim, with a front garden that had clearly been tended by someone who actually knew what they were doing. Not a show garden, mind you. The kind where the lavender has gone a bit wild and the lawn has that comfortable, lived-in look. I stepped out of the car and immediately noticed how quiet it was. Not eerie quiet. The proper quiet of somewhere with actual space around it, where your ears take a moment to recalibrate after hours of motorway drone.

The first thing that struck me about the place itself was the smell. Old wood, I think, and something faintly of coffee from the machine the previous guests had apparently just finished with. The living room had one of those ceilings with exposed beams that look charming in photographs and slightly threatening in person, as if they might brain a tall person. I am not tall, so I found this amusing rather than concerning. My partner, who is, ducked automatically for the first hour until realising the central beam was actually higher than it appeared.

I made a beeline for the kitchen, because I am predictable, and was disproportionately pleased to find a proper kettle rather than one of those continental coffee machines that require a degree in engineering. The windows looked out over the back garden, which sloped down towards what I later learned was typical Gelderland countryside, flat and green and organised in that particularly Dutch way that makes you feel slightly ashamed of your own chaotic existence.

We did not do much that first evening. Unpacked badly, argued lightly about who had packed the wrong adapter, then discovered the cottage had USB points anyway and neither of us had needed to bring anything. I sat in the armchair by the window as the light went, watching a heron make its ungainly way across the field behind the garden, and felt something in my shoulders that had been tight since Dover finally let go.

The mishap with the garden shed felt like it had happened to someone else already. That is the thing about arriving somewhere properly, I think. The journey falls away, the small humiliations fade, and you are simply there, slightly lost but in exactly the right place.