I have never been so pleased to see a set of windbreaks in all my life. Seven hours on the road from Derby, two wrong turns round Rotterdam's ring road, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted on pronouncing every Dutch place name as though it were having a small stroke. By the time I spotted the first glimpse of the North Sea through Katwijk aan Zee's streets, I was ready to kiss the tarmac. Or I would have been, had I not immediately driven straight into a parking bollard.

The bollard won, obviously. It was one of those retractable ones, bright yellow, doing absolutely nothing wrong, simply existing in a place where I was too tired to notice it. The crunch was small but deeply humiliating. A man walking his dog stopped to watch. The dog looked disappointed in me. I sat there for a moment, hands still on the wheel, wondering if I could just stay in the car forever. But the sea air was already sneaking through the window, salty and insistent, and somewhere a seagull was laughing at me. I got out, checked the bumper, found nothing worse than a scuff I could probably blame on a supermarket car park back home, and finally looked up properly at where I'd be staying.

The property sat on one of those narrow Dutch streets where the houses lean together like friends sharing a secret. Whitewashed walls, a proper thatched roof you could practically smell from the pavement, and a front garden so tidy it made my own back home look like a hedge-based crime scene. I fumbled with the key safe, dropped the code twice, and nearly took my own thumb off trying to wrestle the front door open. The door, I later realised, opened outwards. Of course it did. I'd been pulling it like a confused tourist, which, to be fair, I absolutely was.

Stepping inside felt like walking into someone's very organised dream. The place had that particular Dutch talent for making everything look effortless while being ruthlessly practical. Wooden floors that had clearly seen decades of sandy feet. A kitchen where every utensil hung in its designated spot with the quiet confidence of something that had never known chaos. I opened a cupboard looking for a mug and found twelve, all matching, all lined up like a small ceramic army. At home I own three mugs, one of which has a crack I've been ignoring since 2019.

I dumped my bags in the hallway with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who had definitely not just driven into an inanimate object, and made straight for the back of the house. The garden opened up like a stage reveal, all grass and patio furniture and beyond it, the dunes. Actual dunes, tufted with marram grass, rising up like a promise. I could hear the sea properly now, that particular rhythm that no recording ever quite captures. The wind carried something else too, something fried and delicious from a nearby beach pavilion. My stomach announced itself with a growl so loud a neighbouring cat looked over.

I had planned to unpack properly, to settle in with the methodical patience of a sensible adult. Instead I kicked off my shoes, shoved my feet into the nearest pair of wellies that were far too big and clearly meant for someone else, and trudged up over the dunes in what I can only describe as a state of giddy exhaustion. The beach hit me like a photograph I'd forgotten I was in. Wide grey sand stretching in both directions, the North Sea doing its usual unimpressed grey-blue thing, a handful of determined Dutch walkers in proper outdoor gear striding past as though this were a military exercise. I stood there in borrowed wellies with my scuffed bumper and my sat nav trauma and felt something unknot in my chest that I hadn't even realised was tied.

A child flew past on a bicycle, ringing a bell with aggressive cheerfulness. An older couple walked a dog that looked considerably more judgmental than the one from the bollard incident. The wind did that thing where it rearranges your hair without permission and you let it because somehow it feels earned. I thought about the drive, the wrong turns, my own stubborn insistence that I could navigate a country whose road signs I cannot read. I thought about the bollard, still standing somewhere, probably telling its friends about the English idiot. I thought about the matching mugs waiting in the kitchen, the dunes I'd have to climb back over, the fried smell still calling from somewhere down the beach.

I picked up a shell, immediately put it back because it was still alive and I am not a monster, and turned to face the walk back. The wellies flapped against my heels with every step, ridiculous and perfect. Behind me the sea kept up its steady conversation with the shore, indifferent to my arrival, my mishaps, my matching-mug inadequacies. I had sand in my socks already, a small bruise forming where I'd whacked the key safe, and absolutely no idea what I was doing for dinner. It felt, against all reasonable expectation, like the beginning of something rather than the end of a very long drive.

The garden gate stuck slightly when I pushed it, needing that particular angle of shove that every gate develops with age. I stood in the tidy garden with its ruthless Dutch organisation and its view of the dunes and its borrowed wellies, and I laughed. Properly laughed, the kind that comes from somewhere exhausted and relieved and slightly unhinged. The seagull was still laughing too, but now we were laughing together, which felt like progress of a sort.