I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through a canal. There I was, pootling along in my hire car somewhere between Gouda and utter confusion, convinced I was about to discover a revolutionary new water-based route to our holiday cottage. Turns out "Reeuwijkse Plassen" does not, in fact, mean "driveable road." The local fisherman who watched me execute a seventeen-point turn on the narrowest bit of dyke imaginable found it absolutely hilarious. I found it character-building. His wife, who appeared with two cups of coffee and a plate of stroopwafels, found it worthy of immediate hospitality.

"First time in Reeuwijk?" she asked, though it was hardly a question. Her husband, Henk, chuckled into his mug and said something rapid in Dutch that made her swat him with a tea towel. I caught "Engelsman" and something that sounded suspiciously like "typical." We established through a magnificent combination of broken English, enthusiastic pointing, and my GCSE German somehow resurfacing uninvited that I needed to go back past the cheese farm, ignore the second left, and look for the house with the ceramic stork on the gatepost. "You cannot miss it," Henk assured me, which is precisely what every lost person in history has been told right before they miss it entirely.

I did find it, eventually, after what felt like a pastoral odyssey through Southern Holland's most photogenic wrong turns. The cottage sat snug between two of those absurdly perfect Dutch waterways, all tidy brick and steep gables, with a garden that looked like it had been trimmed with nail scissors. Before I could even unclip my seatbelt, the neighbour appeared. This was Truus, seventy-something, armed with a watering can and absolutely no patience for my parking attempt, which she supervised with the intensity of a Wimbledon line judge. "More left," she commanded through my open window, though she meant right. "No, your other left." We compromised on slightly crooked, which she declared "very English" with a satisfied nod.

The key was in a lockbox with a code that had seemed straightforward in the email but required three attempts and some creative swearing. Truus offered commentary throughout. "My nephew in Rotterdam, he is same," she said, not particularly comfortingly. "Always technology problems. He is accountant." I chose to take this as solidarity rather than diagnosis.

By the time I actually stepped inside, I'd already accumulated more local interaction than some holidays manage in a fortnight. The cottage smelled of beeswax and something faintly maritime, all low ceilings and surprisingly steep stairs that I immediately vowed to navigate carefully after wine. Through the kitchen window, I could see Truus had been joined by another neighbour, a chap called Piet who apparently cycled past specifically to inspect my arrival. They stood in animated discussion, occasionally gesturing toward the house. I waved. They waved back, unabashed.

That evening, as I sat with a borrowed chair in the tiny garden watching the light do that extraordinary flat Dutch thing across the water, Truus reappeared with a bowl of erwtensoep and strict instructions about bin collection days. "Thursday, not Friday," she emphasised, as if this distinction held the key to all social acceptance in Reeuwijk. I promised solemnly. She softened, briefly, and told me her grandmother had cooked for Canadian soldiers in 1945. "They also could not park," she said, and disappeared into the dusk before I could determine if this was generational observation or personal insult.

I ate the soup, slightly crooked in my slightly crooked chair, already wondering what tomorrow's characters might bring.