I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through a field outside of Leek. Three hours into our journey to Groningen and there I was, arguing with a disembodied voice about whether a tractor path constituted a legitimate B-road. My wife sat in the passenger seat with that particular expression she saves for my navigational overconfidence, while our two children in the back had already entered the zombie-like state that only a long car journey and excessive Haribo can induce.

The real comedy came at the German border, where I confidently pulled into what I believed was a petrol station, only to discover I had committed us to a car wash. There is something uniquely humiliating about sitting in a Vauxhall Astra, fully clothed, being sprayed with wax while a Dutch family in the queue beyond the glass observe with visible pity. The children thought it was the highlight of the holiday so far. My wife suggested we simply stay in the car wash for the week, as it appeared to have better facilities than some of our previous cottage rentals.

We crossed into the Netherlands proper as afternoon tipped into evening, the flat landscape opening up like a welcome mat. Groningen province has that particular quality of making you feel as though you have driven off the edge of the known world, in the most comforting sense imaginable. The sky here does not merely exist overhead; it dominates, it presses down with a kind of gentle insistence, reminding you how small your worries really are.

The approach to Vlagtwedde revealed itself through a tunnel of trees that seemed to have been planted with deliberate theatrical timing. One moment we were on an ordinary road, the next we had entered something greener, quieter, more deliberate. The village itself sat there with the unshowy confidence of places that have simply existed for a very long time and see no particular reason to make a fuss about it.

Our cottage appeared at the end of a narrow lane, and I will confess to a small surge of relief that it looked precisely as the photographs had promised. Too many times have I arrived at holiday rentals to find that "rustic charm" was code for "active mould colony." Here, the brickwork was honest, the windows sat straight in their frames, and a small garden waited with the patient expectation of green spaces everywhere.

The key was where they said it would be, which felt like a minor miracle in itself. I fumbled with the lock while my wife began her usual efficient unpacking, and the children performed that instantaneous transformation from travel-weary zombies to creatures of explosive energy, charging through rooms and declaring sleeping arrangements with the territorial urgency of colonial powers.

That first evening, we did nothing of consequence. We walked to the small village shop, which closed at half past five with the serene indifference of rural enterprises everywhere, and bought bread and cheese and something unidentified but delicious from the chilled cabinet. We sat in the garden as the light stretched and faded, drinking supermarket wine from mismatched glasses, and I found myself contemplating how thoroughly I had forgotten the texture of proper quiet. Not the absence of noise, exactly, but the presence of something else: birdsong, distant traffic, the particular creak of a wooden chair on paving stones.

My son asked if we could do this every year. My daughter was already half-asleep on my shoulder, sticky with ice cream and contentment. I thought about the car wash, and the Sat Nav's betrayal, and the peculiar blessing of arriving somewhere that asks nothing of you but presence. Some holidays dazzle; this one, I suspected, would simply hold us, and that seemed the greater gift.