I should have known the sat nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through a canal near Leek. Three hours into our slog up from Derbyshire, my other half Dave announced, with the confidence of a man who once read a map in 2007, that he knew a shortcut. Forty minutes later we were nose-to-nose with a Dutch farmer on a tractor track barely wide enough for a bicycle. Dave smiled and waved. The farmer did not wave back.

By the time we limped into Vlagtwedde, I had developed what I can only describe as a profound philosophical hatred of roundabouts. The place sits in the very northeastern corner of Groningen province, practically winking at Germany across the border. It is not, by any stretch, on the way to anywhere else. You come here deliberately, or not at all.

The holiday home revealed itself down a narrow lane flanked by fields so flat they made Lincolnshire look mountainous. I had booked it through Novasol, seduced by photos of exposed beams and promises of proper quiet. What the photos could not convey was the smell. The moment I opened the car door, I was hit by a wall of agricultural honesty that made me briefly consider whether I had accidentally booked a working farm. I had not, as it turned out. The neighbouring fields simply refused to keep their business to themselves.

Dave, ever the optimist, declared it "earthy" and began hauling cases towards the door. This is when our small mishap occurred. In my exhaustion, I had confused the key code email with a spam message about discount windows and deleted it. We stood on the doorstep, surrounded by our own luggage and the judgemental gaze of several cows, while I frantically scrolled through a deleted folder containing nothing but expired pizza offers and something called "financial freedom seminars."

The owner, a practical woman named Saskia who lived in the adjacent village, arrived twenty minutes later to find me attempting to pick the lock with a loyalty card from a garden centre in Stoke. She did not laugh, which I found more devastating than if she had. She simply handed over a physical key and said, in excellent English, "The code is also on the back of the welcome folder." I felt the particular shame of someone who has overcomplicated their own life for absolutely no reason.

Inside, the place immediately redeemed my idiocy. The beams were genuinely ancient, not the cosmetic kind nailed on by developers in the Peak District. The kitchen smelled of wood smoke and something faintly herbal, perhaps from previous occupants or perhaps from the house itself settling after our clumsy arrival. I opened the back door and found a small garden running down to a drainage ditch, beyond which lay nothing but field and sky in a proportion that felt almost aggressive in its openness.

Dave made tea with the urgency of a man who has been driving for six hours and once nearly caused an international farming incident. I stood at the window and watched the light do something peculiar and golden across the flat land. The cows had lost interest in us. A heron lifted from the ditch with the lazy confidence of something that knows exactly where its next meal is coming from.

I thought about how I had spent the entire journey anticipating arrival, and now here I was, slightly defeated by my own incompetence, smelling vaguely of livestock anxiety, and feeling an unexpected loosening in my chest. The sat nav had not been wrong, exactly. It had simply refused to acknowledge that some places demand you approach them slowly, with your defences slightly lowered and your loyalty card safely in your wallet where it belongs.