I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I managed to get my Ford Focus stuck in a farm gate before even reaching the cottage. There I was, wedged at a jaunty angle in a hedge outside Wemeldinge, wondering whether to laugh or cry, when a chap on a bicycle appeared from nowhere and simply said, "American?" in a tone that suggested this happened regularly. I explained, with what dignity I could muster, that I was in fact British and catastrophically lost. He nodded sagely, as if this explained everything, and within minutes had summoned three neighbours to help push me free. Nobody seemed particularly surprised. "Satnav?" one of them asked, and the collective sigh told me everything.

The cottage itself, when I finally arrived, was one of those solid Zeeland bungalows with a garden that smelled of sea air and mown grass. I dumped my bags and headed straight for the village, partly to recover my nerves and partly because a woman called Truus had insisted I try the bakery before it closed. "You look like you need a bolus," she had said, which I later learned was a cinnamon bun and not a medical assessment.

Wemeldinge sits on the Zuid-Beveland peninsula, and the locals have that particular Dutch confidence of people who know their land is below sea level and simply do not care. At the harbour, I met a retired fisherman called Henk who sat on the same bench every afternoon feeding scraps to an obese seagull he had named Willem. "Willem used to fly south for winter," Henk told me, lighting a pipe he never actually smoked. "Now he takes the bus to Middelburg. Less effort." He said this with complete seriousness, and I spent an embarrassingly long time wondering whether Zeeland had a seagull bus service before realising he was pulling my leg.

The next morning I cycled to the Veerse Meer, because everyone in Zeeland cycles everywhere and refusal is apparently suspicious. At a cafe in the marina, I fell into conversation with a woman called Marleen who ran a small boat hire business with her husband. He was, she explained, currently "fixing" their newest vessel, which meant he had been staring at its engine for three days while drinking coffee and sighing. "He is a genius with boats," she said, not entirely convincingly. "The genius is knowing when to stop fixing and start drinking." She had that marvellous Dutch directness, asking within five minutes why I was holidaying alone and whether I was running from something. "Just a bad divorce," I said, surprising myself. "Ah," she replied, pouring more coffee. "We have excellent divorces here. Very flat, like everything else. No drama."

What struck me most was how quickly strangers became temporary confidants. Perhaps it is the landscape, all those wide horizons and big skies, that encourages openness. Or perhaps Zeelanders simply have time, unbothered by the frantic pace of Amsterdam or Rotterdam. On my final evening, I found myself back at the harbour bench with Henk, watching Willem the seagull attempt to steal a child's ice cream. "You will come back," Henk said. It was not a question. I thought about Truus and her bolus recommendations, Marleen's marital commentary, the four men who had pushed my car from a hedge without asking for anything beyond the story of how I had ended up there.

I had arrived embarrassed and disorientated, and was leaving with cinnamon on my shirt and an inexplicable affection for a place I had barely heard of weeks before. Some holidays give you monuments and museums. Wemeldinge gave me Henk, and Willem, and the certain knowledge that somewhere in Zeeland, a man was still staring at a boat engine and sighing.