I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Enkhuizen did not disappoint. We had been driving up from Amsterdam in a hire car that smelled faintly of air freshener and regret, my partner navigating while I clutched a coffee and pretended to understand Dutch road signs. Somewhere near Hoorn, in a moment of overconfidence, I decided I could interpret a roundabout without assistance. I could not. We ended up circling it three times, each pass bringing us face to face with the same bemused cyclist, before shooting off in what I swore was the right direction. It was not. Twenty minutes later we found ourselves in a car park next to a field of very judgmental sheep, and I had to admit that my sense of direction had not improved since a disastrous Duke of Edinburgh expedition in 1998.

By the time we reached the holiday home, I was ready to abandon driving forever and take up canal boating. The property sat on the edge of Enkhuizen's old harbour area, a proper Dutch place with gabled roofs and windows that seemed to peer at you like curious neighbours. Our accommodation was one of those traditional Northern Holland houses, narrow and tall with steep stairs that would become a recurring theme of the week. I attempted to haul my suitcase up them with the dignity of a man who still considered himself young, and promptly wedged it against the banister. My partner walked past with her rucksack, said nothing, and I felt the particular shame of the over-packer.

We had arrived in late May expecting the Netherlands to deliver its famous mild sunshine, the sort of weather that makes coastal walking a pleasure. The first morning proved me gloriously wrong. I woke to grey skies and a wind that rattled the window frames with what I can only describe as personal animosity. Still, we had planned a hike along the IJsselmeer coast, and I am nothing if not stubborn in the face of meteorological evidence. We set off towards the harbour, past the old fishing boats and the Zuiderzeemuseum, which I mentally noted for a drier day.

The path out of town follows the dyke, that extraordinary Dutch engineering that keeps the sea at bay and gives you views across the water that stretch for miles. For perhaps forty minutes we walked in companionable misery, me in a jacket I had foolishly assumed would be sufficient, my partner in borrowed layers that made her look like a very determined onion. The wind came sideways, carrying spray and the smell of salt and something else, something green and alive that I could not identify. I kept expecting to turn back. We did not.

Then, quite without warning, the clouds split. It was not gradual, this transformation, but sudden and almost rude, as if the weather had remembered an appointment elsewhere. Sunlight fell across the dyke in thick golden bars, and the water changed from sullen grey to something bright and moving. We stopped, somewhat foolishly, and stood there with our inadequate coats half-unzipped, letting the warmth settle on faces that had gone slightly numb. A heron lifted from the reeds somewhere below the dyke, slow and unbothered, and I felt that particular holiday feeling that no amount of planning can guarantee: the sense that you have stumbled into a moment that belongs only to you.

We walked further than intended that day, all the way to the nature reserve beyond the town where the path turns inland through meadowland. The ground was soft from earlier rain, and my trainers would never quite recover, but the light stayed with us, low and warm, turning the grass luminous and the distant sails of boats into white punctuation marks against the blue. I found myself walking slower, deliberately, as if I could stretch the afternoon into something longer than its natural span.

That evening, back in the house with its steep stairs and its view of the harbour, I sat with a beer and aching legs and considered my habitual need to control holidays, to plan routes and timings and experiences. The sheep, the roundabout, the wind and the unexpected sun: none of it had been in my spreadsheet. I had not seen the heron coming. I had not planned for the warmth on my face after the cold, and perhaps that was the point. Northern Holland, I was learning, does not perform on demand. It simply offers what it offers, and your job is to keep walking until the weather changes.