I have to be upfront with you: I made a right tit of myself before I even got to the Breukelen. I'd been banging on about this walking holiday in Utrecht for weeks, bought myself a shiny new pair of hiking boots, and promptly left them on the kitchen table in Manchester. Discovered this somewhere over the North Sea, didn't I? So there I was, rolling into Breukelen village in late May with nothing but knackered trainers and misplaced confidence.

The train from Amsterdam Airport had been dead straightforward, mind you. Twenty minutes of flat Dutch countryside, all tidy fields and cyclists who looked like they'd been born in the saddle. I stepped onto the platform at Breukelen station feeling terribly continental, until I realised I'd been walking ten minutes in the wrong direction and had to double back past the same bloke selling tulips three times. He definitely clocked me. I gave him a cheery wave the third time, as if this had been my plan all along.

The Breukelen itself sat tucked along a quiet residential lane, one of those proper Dutch properties with the steep roof and big windows that make you feel like you're staying in a giant slice of cheese. The owners had left the key in a lockbox with a code that was supposedly "simple" but required three attempts and some creative language. I eventually tumbled through the door, rucksack catching on the frame, and stood there in the hallway getting my first proper look.

What struck me immediately was the light. The whole place seemed to drink it in, even on a grey afternoon. The sitting room opened onto a little garden with a terrace, and beyond that I could just make out the glint of water through the trees. The Vecht river, practically on the doorstep. I'd planned my whole trip around walking the riverbanks, you see. The website had bang on about the trails, the little villages dotted along, the whole bucolic Dutch fantasy.

I'd checked the weather obsessively for a fortnight. "Warm and settled," they'd promised. "Perfect for hiking." So naturally, I woke the next morning to horizontal rain and a forecast that had apparently been written by a fantasist. Still, I'm British. A bit of water never hurt anyone. I layered up in everything I'd packed, made a flask of coffee that leaked in my bag, and set off for the riverside path with the grim determination of someone who refuses to admit defeat.

The Vecht river walk from Breukelen towards Nieuwer-Ter-Aa is properly lovely when you can actually see it. I spent the first hour squinting through drizzle, my inadequate trainers making that satisfying squelch with every step. The fancy houses along the riverbank, all gabled roofs and manicured gardens, blurred into impressionist smudges. I passed another walker in full waterproofs who gave me that look. You know the one. The "what on earth are you wearing" look. I smiled breezily, as if my soggy canvas shoes were a deliberate fashion choice.

By midday the clouds did that miraculous Dutch thing and simply evaporated. Suddenly it was twenty degrees, steam rising from my jacket, and I was the idiot trudging along in full thermal regalia while locals in t-shirts glided past on bicycles. I found a bench near a little marina, stripped off layers until I looked like a laundry pile with a head, and just sat there letting the sun do its work.

That's when the self-reflection crept in, as it does when you're alone on a bench with a leaking coffee flask. I'd been so fixated on my "walking holiday" concept, on ticking off routes and proving something, that I'd barely noticed the heron I'd disturbed, or the particular green of the willows against the water, or the way the light kept shifting as the clouds moved. The weather hadn't ruined anything. It had just asked me to pay attention differently.

I walked back slowly that afternoon, proper slowly, letting my rubbish trainers find their own pace. The same tulip seller was packing up near the station. "Found your way then?" he called out, not unkindly. I bought some bulbs I knew I'd probably kill, and wandered home to the Breukelen with soil in my pockets and a sunburn forming where I'd forgotten to strip a layer.

The terrace got proper use that evening. I sat out with a beer from the village shop, watching the sky do its late-spring thing of refusing to get properly dark, and planned nothing at all for the morning. The boots on my kitchen table in Manchester could wait. So could my grand hiking ambitions. Some holidays, I've learned, are better walked in whatever you've got, at whatever pace the weather allows.