I should have known the holiday was off to a classic start when I confidently loaded the sat nav with our cottage address and promptly drove straight past the turning for Vlagtwedde. There we were, my wife, our two children, and myself, cruising merrily toward the German border while the actual cottage sat somewhere behind us in the Groningen countryside. The children found this hilarious, naturally. My wife less so, though she was kind enough to wait a full ten minutes before mentioning that the sign for Vlagtwedde had been rather large and rather obvious.

We found our way eventually, winding through flat green fields that seemed to stretch on forever. The Netherlands, I kept reminding myself, is not all Amsterdam canals and tulip fields. Up here in the northeast, the landscape has a quiet, honest charm. Wide horizons, big skies, and the occasional sheep looking at you with that particular expression of mild disappointment that sheep have perfected.

The cottage itself sat at the end of a little lane, a proper brick-built place with a tidy garden and a small terrace where I immediately pictured myself with a morning coffee. The key was in the lockbox as promised, though getting it out required the dexterity of a safecracker and the patience of a saint. I possessed neither, but after several minutes of fumbling while the children asked repeatedly if we could go in yet, the door swung open.

The smell hit first. That particular scent of a well-kept holiday let: slightly woody, faintly of cleaning products, but underlying it all, the promise of someone else's comfortable life temporarily loaned to you. The living room was spacious in that unpretentious Dutch way, with a proper dining table that would actually seat six without anyone elbowing anyone else. I have stayed in enough holiday places where the table is clearly an afterthought, squeezed into a corner like a piece of furniture that has lost an argument with the room.

The kitchen was better equipped than my own at home, which I found both impressive and slightly shaming. I made a mental note to buy a proper vegetable peeler when we returned. The children had already disappeared upstairs to claim bedrooms, their footsteps thumping on what I discovered later were surprisingly creaky floorboards. The kind of creaks that speak of age and solid construction rather than impending collapse, I told myself firmly.

My wife opened the back doors to the garden while I investigated the bathroom situation. Two bathrooms, as it turned out, which felt like an almost indecent luxury for a family break. No more queueing for showers, no more tense negotiations about who had used all the hot water. I emerged to find her standing on the terrace, laughing at something. A duck had waddled into the garden from the little pond nearby and was now inspecting our car with what I can only describe as professional interest.

We spent that first evening unpacking badly, eating bread and cheese from the supermarket in Winschoten, and sitting on that terrace as the light faded slowly across the fields. The children, miraculously, were playing a board game without arguing. My wife and I shared a bottle of wine and watched the sky turn that particular shade of northern European blue that seems to last for hours.

I thought about our wrong turn earlier, my stubbornness in not turning around sooner, the gentle ribbing I would endure for the rest of the trip. But sitting there, with the quiet of the countryside settling around us and the distant sound of a tractor somewhere in the fields, it felt like the perfect beginning. Sometimes the wrong road gets you somewhere worth being, even if it takes you through Germany first.