I should have known the satnav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through a tulip field. There I was, bleary-eyed after the ferry from Harwich, convinced I was being clever by avoiding the motorways. Three hours of narrow Dutch lanes later, and my hire car was playing dodgems with a tractor the size of a bungalow. The mishap? I got out to ask directions at a farm shop, tripped over absolutely nothing, and sent a packet of stroopwafels flying into a drainage ditch. The farmer found it hilarious. I found it less so, mostly because those wafels were meant to be my emergency sugar supply.

By the time I crawled into Noordwijk, the North Sea fog had rolled in like a damp grey blanket. I had booked one of those traditional Dutch holiday homes through Novasol, the sort with proper wooden shutters and a garden that promised barbecues I would almost certainly never attempt. The property sat on a quiet residential street, a short stumble from the dunes. I say stumble because by then my legs had forgotten what walking in a straight line felt like.

The key was in one of those lockbox affairs, and I spent a good five minutes jabbing numbers while a neighbour watched from her window with the sort of patience that suggested she had seen this performance many times before. When the box finally clicked open, I may have said something celebratory and slightly rude. She closed her curtains. I do not blame her.

Stepping inside was like walking into a hug from someone's very tidy grandmother. The place smelled of polished wood and something faintly lavender, which I later discovered was a sachet in the airing cupboard I would never have opened had I not been hunting for towels. The living room had that wonderful Dutch efficiency about it: a proper dining table that actually seated six, a sofa you could sink into without disappearing entirely, and windows that let in what little grey light the afternoon could muster. I stood there for a moment, still clutching my single surviving bag, and felt something in my shoulders finally drop.

The kitchen was compact but dangerously well-equipped. I say dangerously because I am the sort of person who sees a proper coffee machine and immediately believes I can operate it. I could not. The resulting noise brought me back to the neighbour's curtains, which twitched. I retreated with a mug of something lukewarm and pretended that was my intention all along.

Upstairs, the bedrooms were simple and spotless, with duvets that looked thick enough to survive a Dutch winter, which I suppose they must. The bathroom had one of those excellent deep baths that the Dutch seem to understand better than we do, and a heated towel rail that I touched approximately seventeen times just to confirm it was real.

I did not bother unpacking properly. Instead, I pulled on the only jacket that did not smell of ferry, shoved my feet into damp trainers, and walked the five minutes to the beach. The fog made everything soft and strange, the sea invisible beyond the dunes, the sand cold and firm underfoot. A handful of dog walkers nodded as they passed. I nodded back, feeling already like someone who belonged there, which of course I did not, not really, but for a week I could pretend.

That first evening, I sat in the garden with a supermarket beer and listened to the distant sea. The neighbour's lights were on. I raised my can in silent apology. Somewhere, a bicycle bell rang out. I thought about the stroopwafels in the ditch, the coffee machine I had defeated, the journey that had brought me here through tulip fields and tractors and my own stubborn refusal to pay motorway tolls. It had been ridiculous. It had been entirely my own fault. And sitting there, slightly chilly, slightly ridiculous myself, I could not have been more pleased about it.