I should have known the sat nav was up to no good when it started speaking in what I can only describe as a confident mumble. Three hours from the Eurotunnel, cruising through Belgium with the windows down and my spirits up, I felt thoroughly smug about this whole driving-to-the-Continent lark. Then, somewhere past Maastricht, the thing directed me down a farm track that grew progressively more agricultural until I was essentially sharing the road with a very judgmental-looking goat.

The mishap itself was small but spectacularly stupid. I'd stopped for petrol and, in my post-motorway haze, managed to fill the windscreen washer reservoir with what I thought was water but turned out to be some sort of energy drink I'd bought at the services. Don't ask me how I confused the two. The bottle was blue, the cap came off easily, and apparently my brain had switched to autopilot. For the remainder of the journey, every attempt to clean the windscreen released a sticky, citrus-scented fog that made the car smell like a teenager's bedroom. The goat, I felt, understood my shame.

By the time I actually found Stramproy, I was in that peculiar state of tiredness where everything feels slightly unreal. The village sits in the north of Limburg, proper countryside, the kind of place where you half expect to see a painting class set up by a canal. And there, down a lane lined with trees that seemed to lean in with curiosity, was the house.

First impressions? It looked like someone had taken a traditional Dutch farmhouse and given it a very sensible makeover. None of your rustic draughtiness or wobbly floorboards. The place had proper presence, red brick and white trim, with a garden that suggested someone had actually thought about what they were planting rather than just letting nature have its chaotic way. I stood there with my ridiculous sticky windscreen and my crumpled map, feeling simultaneously relieved and faintly ridiculous.

The key collection was straightforward, mercifully, because by this point I couldn't have managed a puzzle. Stepping inside, the first thing that hit me was the smell of clean and wood, that particular holiday-let aroma that always makes me slightly emotional after a long drive. The living area was open and light, with beams across the ceiling that looked original enough to have some history but not so original that you worried about them dropping on your head. Someone had left a small bowl of apples on the table, which I immediately ate one of without washing, too hungry and too tired to observe basic hygiene.

I dumped my bags and did the obligatory wander. The kitchen was properly equipped, not one of those places where you open a drawer and find a single bent fork and a can opener from 1973. Bedrooms upstairs, comfortable-looking beds with that slightly too-firm mattress that always turns out to be exactly what your back wanted. But it was the garden that really stopped me. A proper outdoor space, not just a token patio, with a terrace area and enough green that you felt you were actually in the Limburg countryside rather than simply adjacent to it.

I made a cup of tea, because I am British and it is the law, and sat outside with it cooling untouched while I just breathed. The energy drink incident already felt like it belonged to someone else, some earlier, more frantic version of me. A bird I couldn't identify made a noise in a tree. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once and seemed to think better of it.

That's the thing about arriving somewhere properly after a long journey. The mishaps don't disappear, but they settle into their proper size. Small. Manageable. Almost funny, if you give them half an hour and a change of scenery. I sipped my tea, finally, and started to feel like a person again rather than a driver with a sticky windscreen and a growing sense of geographical incompetence.