I have never been more grateful to see a kettle in my entire life. After six hours of driving from the Eurotunnel, two wrong turns around Rotterdam, and one spectacularly ill-judged attempt to overtake a tractor on a canal bridge, I finally pulled up to our holiday cottage in Woubrugge. My partner opened the car door, stretched dramatically, and promptly dropped his phone into a puddle. Welcome to Southern Holland, we thought. Brilliant start.

The journey had been one of those classic British-in-Europe affairs. I had insisted on bringing my own teabags, which my partner found hilarious until we realised the nearest supermarket was a twenty-minute cycle away. The satnav had developed a personality crisis somewhere past Dordrecht, suddenly deciding that every canal was a road and every road was a suggestion. We found ourselves crawling through villages with names I could not pronounce, surrounded by flat green fields that seemed to stretch forever. It is remarkably difficult to feel sophisticated when you are doing twelve miles an hour behind a man on a bicycle carrying three children and a dog in a wooden cart.

By the time we reached Woubrugge, I had developed a slightly hysterical relationship with the steering wheel. The village itself appeared so quietly, so unassumingly, that I nearly missed it entirely. One moment we were between fields, the next we were beside a canal with boats bobbing gently and houses that looked like they had been painted by someone with a very steady hand and a fondness for neatness.

Our cottage sat right on the water's edge, which I had thought sounded romantic when booking and now, in my exhausted state, simply seemed like a drowning hazard. The key was in a lockbox, and I spent an embarrassing five minutes trying to open it while my partner performed an elaborate pantomime of patience. When the door finally swung open, the smell hit me first. Not the damp, slightly disappointing smell of rental properties back home, but something clean and somehow green, as if the nearby reeds had politely introduced themselves through the walls.

I will be honest. My first impression was mostly about the sofa. It looked at me with the promise of immediate collapse, and I accepted this offer without dignity. My partner, ever the explorer, had already vanished upstairs to investigate. I heard his footsteps, then a pause, then a delighted laugh. The bedrooms, apparently, had sloped ceilings that would punish anyone over five foot ten. He is six foot two. I chose to remain on the sofa and contemplate my life choices.

The kitchen was one of those compact, efficient Dutch arrangements where everything has a designated home and a surprising number of things are hidden inside other things. I opened what I thought was a cupboard and found a dishwasher. I opened a drawer and discovered a full set of proper wine glasses. This felt like witchcraft to someone used to British holiday lets where you are lucky to find a mug without a crack.

Evening arrived without me really noticing. The light here does something different, I think, or perhaps I was simply too tired to process time properly. We made tea with my smuggled teabags and stood by the window watching a heron stand completely still in the canal. My partner's phone, rescued and drying on the radiator, buzzed occasionally with concerned messages from his mother. We ignored them. The heron ignored us. The water made small sounds against the boats outside.

I found myself thinking, as I often do in these moments, about how I had imagined this arrival. In my mind there had been golden light, effortless elegance, perhaps me stepping from the car looking refreshed and continental. Instead there was mud, mild bickering, and a phone in a puddle. Yet standing there with my terrible tea, watching the heron refuse to move, I felt something settle. The mishaps had become the story already. The wrong turns and the tractor and the satnav's breakdown had led here, to this particular window, this particular quiet.

Tomorrow we would figure out the cycling, the local cheese farm apparently nearby, the proper way to explore these waterways without falling in. Tonight, I simply stood in a stranger's kitchen in a village I could not have placed on a map a month ago, and felt the peculiar relief of having arrived exactly where you meant to be, even if you took the longest possible route to get there.