I have never been brilliant with satnavs, so it will surprise absolutely no one that I spent twenty minutes circling a roundabout near Roermond convinced I was "nearly there," only to discover I had been orbiting the same patch of tulip-dotted grass three times. My partner, who had been making encouraging noises, finally admitted she had been reading the map upside down. We laughed until we wheezed, then found the actual turning within ninety seconds. Classic us.

The holiday home in Heel sits down a quiet lane where the world seems to slow the moment you turn off the main road. Ours was a modest, tidy place with a small garden that caught the afternoon sun like it had been waiting specifically for us. I remember standing in the kitchen with a cup of tea that first evening, watching light spill across the little patio, feeling that particular relief of knowing you have absolutely nowhere to be.

That became the rhythm of the week. Mornings began slowly, usually with coffee outside in pyjamas, watching a neighbour cycle past with a dog in his front basket. The dog always looked faintly embarrassed by the arrangement. We never set alarms. Some days we barely left the garden, just read our books and moved our chairs to follow the shade. I finished a novel I had been carrying around since March. My partner napped in a deckchair and woke up with crease marks on her cheek and no idea what time it was.

When we did wander out, it was never far. Heel itself is small and unhurried, a village where people nod hello even if they have never seen you before. We walked along the Maas on an afternoon when the water looked like beaten metal, stopping to watch a heron stand completely still for so long I genuinely wondered if it was a decoy. There is a little marina nearby where we bought ice creams and sat on a bench doing nothing more demanding than licking drips off our wrists.

I had packed walking boots with serious intentions. They stayed in the car boot all week. Instead we pottered to the local bakery for bread still warm from the oven, ate lunch in the garden with cheese and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, and let afternoons dissolve into evenings without any particular event to mark the transition. One day we cycled to a nearby vineyard, not for a grand tour, but just to sit outside with a glass of something local and watch the light change over the vines. The cycling was flat and gentle, exactly my speed, through lanes lined with pollarded trees that looked like they had been trimmed by someone with strong opinions.

I think what struck me most was how quickly I stopped feeling guilty about the inactivity. At home I am always half-thinking of the next thing that needs doing. Here, the garden, the sunshine, the slow pace of the village all conspired to make stillness feel like the whole point rather than something stolen. I caught myself just staring at bees working through the lavender for minutes at a time, completely content.

On our last morning I sat outside early, wrapped in a blanket with a final cup of tea, watching mist lift off the fields. The same neighbour cycled past, same dog, same dignified expression of mild humiliation. We exchanged waves. I thought about how I would describe this holiday to friends back home, and realised the best parts would sound almost boring: the reading, the napping, the heron that might have been a decoy, the cheese, the light. But that was precisely it. Sometimes doing very little, very slowly, in a small sunny corner of Limburg, is exactly enough.