I'd never heard of Heinkenszand before booking this trip. Somewhere in Zeeland, the website said, which meant nothing to me except that it sounded like a place where nothing much happens and everything takes ages to get to. I was half right.

The drive from the Eurotunnel took four and a half hours, most of it through flat farmland that gradually turned into flat farmland with water. My partner dozed while I developed a fierce relationship with the sat nav, which insisted on pronouncing Dutch place names as though it were having a small stroke. "Turn right onto the N-schhhh-eeew-weg," it would announce, and I would reply with words that would not feature in a family publication.

The mishap, when it came, was spectacularly stupid. We stopped at a supermarket in Goes for supplies, filled two bags with cheese, bread, and several bottles of wine that seemed essential for rural survival, then spent twenty minutes wandering the car park trying to remember where we'd parked. I had taken a photo of the car's location, clever me, except I had somehow captured only my own left foot and a patch of tarmac. We found the car eventually, by which point I had achieved that particular shade of pink that my partner refers to as "your GPS face."

Heinkenszand itself announced itself with a church spire and a profound silence. The holiday park sat on the edge of the village, neat rows of bungalows with tidy gardens and that particular Dutch talent for making everything look freshly painted. Our bungalow, when we finally located it, was one of the detached ones with its own little terrace and a view across grassland that stretched towards distant trees. I had expected something more basic; instead there was proper furniture, a decent kitchen, and a bathroom that did not look like it had witnessed the darker side of package tourism.

The first thing I did was make coffee using the machine provided, which gurgled and steamed with continental confidence while I stood at the sliding doors and watched a magpie strut across the lawn like it owned the place. The second thing I did was open one of those bottles of wine, because it was half past four and I decided that constituted evening in this time zone.

What struck me most, that first hour, was the quality of the quiet. Not silence exactly - birds, distant voices, the occasional bicycle passing on the road - but a settled, purposeful absence of noise. No traffic hum, no planes overhead, none of the constant low-grade roar that I had stopped noticing at home but suddenly missed with the intensity of a phantom limb. I found myself speaking more quietly without meaning to, as though the place demanded it.

My partner unpacked while I wandered the perimeter of our small garden, examining the hedge and the neighbouring bungalows with the suspicion of a man who has spent too long in cities. Everyone here had bicycles. Everyone had tidy window boxes. I felt briefly like an impostor, a bringer of chaos and misplaced cars, but then the wine kicked in and the magpie returned, and I decided I could probably manage this level of civilisation for a week.

By six o'clock we had established ourselves on the terrace with bread and cheese, watching the light change across that flat landscape. I thought about our lost car, my sat nav arguments, the four hours of driving, and decided that some journeys are worth the small humiliations they inflict. The magpie clearly agreed. It was still there when we finally went inside, holding court over an empty garden, waiting for us to get things properly wrong again.