I have never been so grateful for a sat nav with a sense of humour, or perhaps it was just broken, because ours decided that the quickest route to our Rewal holiday home involved three dirt tracks, a field of very suspicious geese, and what I am fairly certain was someone's private driveway. My partner, Dave, kept saying "it knows what it's doing" right up until we found ourselves face to face with a man in wellies who was definitely not expecting a Vauxhall Corsa full of suitcases and panic.

"Rewal?" he said, scratching his head. "You want the other road. The one with the tarmac."

We had been on the road since five that morning, having caught the ferry to Gdansk and then driven what felt like halfway to Russia. By the time we actually found our Novasol property, a neat little wooden place with a balcony that practically begged for a cup of tea, I was ready to kiss the gravel. Dave, ever the optimist, had already started chatting to our neighbour, a chap called Tadeusz who was pruning something in his garden with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb.

"You are English," Tadeusz said. It was not a question. "I learn English from Only Fools and Horses. Lovely jubbly."

I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my handbag. He told us he had retired from the shipyards in Szczecin and now grew tomatoes that he was "too competitive about" at the local market. His wife, he said, thought he spent too much time talking to tourists. He clearly did not care. Within twenty minutes he had explained the bin system, warned us about a seagull he called "the criminal," and given us three tomatoes that were genuinely the best I have ever eaten.

The woman who managed the property, a brisk but warm person called Magda, arrived to check us in and immediately noticed Dave's Only Fools and Horses t-shirt. She rolled her eyes so dramatically I thought they might get stuck. "Tadeusz has got to you already," she said. "He is everywhere. Like the wind, but with opinions." She showed us how the boiler worked, told us the nearest shop for proper bread was a fifteen-minute walk, and mentioned that her grandmother still swam in the Baltic every morning until October. "She is eighty-four and very rude. You will meet her. Everyone does."

We did meet her. The next morning, in fact, down at the beach, which was a proper five-minute stroll through pine trees that smelled like heaven. Dave had insisted on a swim despite the water looking like it had been freshly delivered from the Arctic. An elderly woman in a swimming cap materialised from nowhere, watched him yelp his way in, and said to me in perfect English, "Your husband is dramatic. I like this. Most English men are dramatic or drunk. He is only one."

I did not know whether to defend Dave's honour or simply accept the wisdom of a woman who clearly had decades of tourist observation behind her. I went with acceptance. She told me she had survived the war as a child in a village nearby, had moved to Rewal when it was still "just fishermen and mosquitoes," and now considered it her personal duty to intimidate newcomers into respecting the sea. "It looks calm," she said, gesturing at the grey-blue water. "It is not calm. It is waiting."

Tadeusz appeared at that moment, because of course he did, bearing a thermos of something hot and sweet that he insisted we try. "My wife says I am too friendly," he said, pouring cups for all of us including the grandmother, whose name turned out to be Halina. "Halina says I am not friendly enough. Between them I am perfect."

Halina snorted. It was the most elegant snort I have ever witnessed.

We spent most of that first day doing very little, which was the point, drifting between the beach and our little balcony, talking to whoever wandered past. A teenage boy walking a dog that was clearly not his own stopped to practise his English by listing every British football club he could remember. A woman selling smoked fish from a van near the shore gave Dave a free sample after he attempted to pronounce the Polish name and produced something that sounded like a sneeze. "Good try," she said, laughing. "For this, you eat for free."

By evening, Dave and I sat with our balcony doors open, listening to the distant sound of the sea and the much closer sound of Tadeusz and Halina having what sounded like an argument but was probably just affectionate shouting. We were exhausted, slightly sunburned in that particular British way where you do not notice until it is too late, and completely charmed.

Dave turned to me with a beer in hand and said, "I thought we were coming for the beach."

"We were," I said. "We got the geese and the locals instead."

"Better," he said, and clinked his bottle against mine.

I could not argue with that.