I have to be honest with you about how this holiday started, because if I only told you the good bits you'd think I was one of those smug travel influencers who never puts a foot wrong. I am very much not that person.

We'd been driving up from the Eurotunnel, Google Maps confidently guiding us through Belgium and into Gelderland, when I decided I knew better than the satnav. "This looks like a shortcut," I said, with the misplaced confidence of a man who once got lost in his own garden centre. Forty minutes later we were bumping down a farm track, surrounded by fields of maize that seemed to stretch to Germany, and my partner was giving me that look. You know the one. The "shall I check if the car hire insurance covers marital breakdown" look.

The Wenum Wiesel itself appeared like a mirage when we finally found it, tucked among trees on the edge of Wenum-Wiesel village. I'd booked what the website called a "characterful detached holiday home," which in my experience usually means "charming if you squint." But stepping out of the car, sweaty and slightly ashamed, I was genuinely taken aback. Proper thatched roof, big garden humming with insects in the late afternoon warmth, and this lovely covered terrace where someone had left a bottle of local beer in the fridge. I nearly cried. Partly relief, partly because I'd been wearing the same trousers for nine hours.

The first evening was about doing absolutely nothing purposeful. We sat on that terrace as the heat of the day softened into something golden and lazy, watching swallows dart about and drinking the beer I'd definitely earned. The house had this satisfying solidity to it, thick walls and wooden beams, the kind of place that feels like it has absorbed decades of other people's holidays. I kept catching myself smiling for no particular reason, the way you do when you finally stop moving.

Next morning I woke early, that first-night-in-a-strange-bed alertness, and slipped outside with coffee. The garden was already warm, dew steaming off the grass, and I could hear proper countryside silence broken only by a distant tractor. I walked down to the lane in my socks, which was a mistake, and stood there like a fool watching the mist lift off the fields. There's something about Gelderland's landscape that sneaks up on you. Not dramatic, not trying to impress, just quietly, stubbornly beautiful.

We'd planned ambitious walks for the heatwave that was forecast, coastal hikes up near the IJsselmeer, big striding days with packed lunches and that satisfying ache afterwards. The weather, naturally, had other ideas. By mid-morning the sky had that particular bruised quality that Dutch skies do so well, and by lunchtime we were watching rain sheet down from the covered terrace, our walking boots still pristine by the door.

I felt that familiar holiday frustration, the sense of plans thwarted, time slipping away. But my partner, who is generally wiser about such things, suggested we simply walk anyway. "Just round here," she said. "See what we find."

So we did. Waterproofs on, we splashed through Wenum-Wisel's lanes, past brick houses with immaculate gardens, along paths that turned to streams. The rain softened to drizzle, then stopped entirely, and we found ourselves in woodland that smelled of wet earth and pine, every leaf gleaming. We walked further than intended, got slightly lost again (a theme, I admit), and emerged somewhere near Apeldoorn's edge with muddy trousers and a sense of ridiculous achievement.

That evening, drying out by the wood burner we'd not expected to need, I kept thinking about those walks. The planned coastal ones would have been grand, I'm sure, but there was something about the improvised, rain-altered version that felt more genuinely ours. The holiday home's warmth after being properly wet through, the shared silliness of it, the way Gelderland's ordinary corners revealed themselves when we stopped trying to make them extraordinary.

I still want those coastal hikes, mind. We've promised ourselves we'll return, perhaps in proper summer when the heat behaves as advertised. But I'm oddly grateful the weather misbehaved, forced us sideways into something better than our plans. The Wenum Wiesel gave us shelter and beer and that magnificent terrace. We gave ourselves permission to get lost, get wet, and stop being so bloody organised about enjoying ourselves.