I should have known the Sat Nav was plotting against me the moment it tried to send us through a field near Wierden. There we were, three hours into our journey from Hull, the kids in the back asking for the fifteenth time if we were nearly there, and Google's cheerful voice announcing a left turn into what was very clearly someone's beetroot crop. My husband Mark gave me that look. You know the one. The "you said this would be straightforward" look. I defended myself with a packet of wine gums and the stubborn insistence that this was all part of the adventure.

We found the proper road eventually, winding through the flat green patchwork that makes Overijssel feel like someone pressed the reset button on your brain. The Netherlands does this to you. One minute you're stressed about motorway lanes, the next you're pootling past a canal with a heron standing guard like a feathered bouncer, and your shoulders drop about three inches.

The Hoge Hexel itself appeared at the end of a gravel track, and I will admit to a small gasp. Not a dramatic one, I'm not that sort, but a definite intake of breath. The place has proper cottage bones, thatched roof and everything, sitting there like something from a storybook illustration. Mark immediately started doing his "I'm not impressed but actually I am" face, which involves squinting and nodding slowly. The children had already spotted the garden trampoline and were halfway out of their seatbelts before I'd even found the handbrake.

Here is where I must confess my mishap. In my eagerness to capture the moment for posterity, or more accurately for my sister's inevitable "how's the holiday then" text, I attempted a photograph while stepping backwards onto the gravel. The gravel, it turns out, was not interested in cooperating. My ankle turned, my dignity fled, and I executed what I can only describe as an interpretive dance move involving a wheelie suitcase, a potted geranium, and a small shriek. Mark laughed so hard he had to lean against the car. The kids, bless them, asked if I was dead. I was not dead. I was merely humbled, which is probably healthy for a Tuesday.

The owners, a lovely couple from the village who live in the adjacent property, emerged to find me brushing gravel from my elbow and pretending this was absolutely how I'd planned to arrive. They were far too polite to mention the spectacle, though I caught a definite twinkle. They showed us round with that unhurried Dutch warmth that makes you feel instantly like a guest rather than a customer. The kitchen smelled of the bread they'd left us, proper crusty stuff that we demolished within the hour despite having eaten a service station sandwich somewhere near Utrecht.

By evening we'd settled into that particular rhythm of a cottage holiday, the one where simple things become events. Mark built a fire in the wood burner with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. The children discovered the board games cupboard and argued over Monopoly rules. I sat with my slightly swollen ankle propped on a pouffe, drinking tea from a mug with a windmill on it, and felt that particular click of contentment that only comes when you've stopped trying to make things perfect and just let them be what they are.

The countryside around Hoge Hexel does not shout for your attention. It murmurs. The next morning I limped to the village shop for milk, passing cyclists who nodded as if we'd known each other for years, and realised I was already moving slower, breathing deeper, noticing the way the light falls across those endless Dutch fields. Sometimes the best holidays are the ones that catch you off balance, quite literally in my case, and remind you that arrival is not just about reaching a place, but about letting yourself settle into it, gravel and all.