I have never been so relieved to see a canal in all my life. There we were, my partner and I, trundling up the A7 from Groningen city in our hired Fiat 500, absolutely convinced we were lost. The sat nav had given up about ten minutes prior, resigning itself to a sullen silence, and I had taken it upon myself to navigate using nothing but instinct and a screenshot of Google Maps taken in a hurry at Schiphol Airport. This is, I should note, not a recommended strategy.

The mishap came at what I believed to be our turning. "Left here," I announced with the confidence of a man who had never been to Groningen before. We bumped down a narrow lane, my partner's knuckles whitening on the door handle, until we found ourselves face to face with a rather unimpressed Dutch farmer and his herd of Friesian cows. No holiday cottage. No canal-side idyll. Just bovine judgment and the sinking realisation that I had confused two similarly named lanes. We reversed with what dignity we could muster, which was none whatsoever, and eventually found the proper track to our Wagenborgen cottage some twenty minutes later.

But oh, the relief of arrival. The cottage sat nestled among trees, a proper red-brick affair with that satisfying solidity you only seem to find in Dutch country builds. A small private garden stretched down to the water's edge, where a little rowing boat bobbed in the afternoon light. I promptly forgot my navigational shame and stood there like a fool, breathing in air that smelled of cut grass and somewhere distant, someone else's barbecue.

We did not do much that first afternoon, and that was rather the point. The sun had come out with typical Dutch enthusiasm - meaning it might vanish at any moment, so one must appreciate it properly. We dragged out the weathered wooden chairs from the veranda and positioned them with mathematical precision to catch maximum rays. My partner produced a novel she had been carrying since Heathrow. I had brought a stack of newspapers and the sincere intention of reading them cover to cover, an ambition I have held on approximately forty previous holidays and achieved on none.

The Wagenborgen area does not shout for your attention, and that is its particular charm. We wandered perhaps a mile along the canal path that evening, passing the occasional cyclist who nodded with that friendly but not intrusive manner the Dutch have perfected. A heron watched us from the opposite bank with the expression of someone who has seen countless befuddled tourists find their way here. We passed a small playground, empty in the weekday calm, and a modest church whose bells marked the hour without demanding anything of us.

Dinner was simple provisions from a village shop we had spotted near our wrong turn - cheese, bread, tomatoes that actually tasted of something. We ate on the little terrace as the light stretched long across the water, and I found myself contemplating whether my compulsion to plan and navigate and achieve had perhaps been misplaced all these years. The cows, I decided, had been right to judge me. I had been going about holidays entirely wrong.

The next morning brought coffee in the garden, a slow examination of the same newspaper from the previous day, and a gentle agreement that we might row the boat later. Or we might not. The sun was warm, the chairs were perfectly positioned, and the heron had returned to its post. Some places reward doing very little indeed.