I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I put the sat nav postcode in wrong and ended up at a tractor dealership just outside Middelburg. There I was, sat in a Vauxhall Corsa surrounded by enormous green machines, wondering why my "luxury Zeeland holiday home" looked suspiciously like a John Deere showroom. Turns out Heinkenszand and a random industrial estate share alarmingly similar postcodes when you transpose two digits after a large coffee and no breakfast.

The actual journey from the Eurotunnel had been smooth enough, mind you. Straight down through Belgium, across the border into the Netherlands, and then that lovely stretch over the Zeeland Bridge with the water glinting everywhere you looked. Zeeland's got more water than land, practically, and driving over those long causeways makes you feel like you're skimming across the sea itself. Proper dramatic stuff, especially when the light starts going golden.

I eventually found the proper address, a tidy little bungalow down a quiet lane, and was fumbling with the key safe when my first local encounter happened. A chap called Henk appeared from next door, walking what I initially thought was a dog but was actually an enormous cat on a lead. "You are the English," he announced, which I couldn't really argue with. He helped me with the key safe, which apparently requires the patience of a saint and the fingers of a concert pianist, all while his cat sat watching with evident disapproval.

"You come for the quiet," Henk said. It wasn't a question. I nodded. "Good. We are very quiet. Except Thursday. Thursday is bin day. Very exciting." He said this with such deadpan sincerity that I laughed, then stopped, then realised he was joking. I think. With the Dutch you can never be entirely sure, which is rather charming once you get used to it.

The bungalow itself was spotless, all blonde wood and enormous windows looking out towards a garden that had clearly been tended with military precision. I later met the gardener, a wiry woman called Truus who spoke almost entirely in Zeeland dialect that even Henk admitted he sometimes struggled with. She was pruning something with ferocious concentration when I offered a tentative hello. "Ach, the Englishman," she said, not looking up. "You will want to go to the beach. Everyone wants the beach. The beach is full of Germans. Better you sit here, I make you coffee." And so I did, perched on her wheelbarrow, drinking extraordinarily strong coffee and learning more than I needed to know about the local slug population.

That evening I walked to the village proper, which took all of twelve minutes, and found myself in a tiny pub where the barman, another Henk because apparently every third man in Zeeland is called Henk, was engaged in a heated debate with a farmer about whether last Tuesday counted as proper rain or merely "heavy dampness." They included me immediately, which was flattering until I realised they needed a tie-breaking opinion and I had absolutely no idea what constituted legitimate precipitation in these parts.

"English rain is different," Farmer Henk declared, as if this settled everything. "English rain is sad rain. Our rain is practical rain." I wanted to argue, but then I thought about Manchester in November and found I couldn't really disagree.

By the time I wandered back to the bungalow, slightly wobbly from unexpectedly generous Dutch measures, I was already composing the text to my brother about the whole affair. "Met a man with a cat on a lead," I typed, then deleted it. Some things you need to explain in person, with hand gestures and the proper emphasis on just how large that cat actually was.

The mishap with the postcode felt like weeks ago already, though it had only been hours. That's the thing about proper holidays, I suppose. They expand somehow, let you fit more into them than should be possible. I fell asleep to the sound of absolutely nothing, which after London might as well have been another country entirely, and woke to Truus already attacking the hedges with what sounded like industrial machinery but was apparently just her morning energy.

I never did make it to that beach. Somehow there was always another conversation, another cup of improbably strong coffee, another local with opinions about weather or Germans or the proper way to grow tomatoes in a country that gets approximately forty-seven minutes of summer. And honestly? I wouldn't have had it any other way.