I have never been so grateful for a sat nav giving up on me as I was the day we tried to find our Rowy holiday home. There we were, crawling along a dirt track somewhere between Slupsk and the Baltic coast, my partner Dave insisting he knew a shortcut while I clutched a bag of warm zeppelins and tried not to look at the fuel gauge. The zeppelins, by the way, were the potato kind from a petrol station near Gdansk, not the airship kind, though at that point I would not have been surprised to see one drift past.

The mishap came when Dave, ever the optimist, decided to ask directions from a man repairing a fence. The man spoke no English. Dave speaks no Polish. I speak enough to order beer and apologise, which covers most of my needs abroad. What followed was ten minutes of elaborate charades involving arm movements, pointing at phones, and Dave accidentally implying we were looking for a lost horse rather than a holiday cottage. The fence man, whose name we later learned was Bogdan, became increasingly animated, eventually abandoning his fence entirely to lead us personally through three more dirt tracks, two farm gates, and what I am fairly certain was someone's back garden. He talked the entire way, waving at fields and occasionally laughing at what I suspect were jokes about Englishmen and their sat navs.

We arrived at the NOVASOL property in Rowy to find it exactly as advertised, which in my experience of holiday bookings is something of a miracle. Wooden exterior, proper little terrace, the sea audible if not quite visible. Bogdan accepted our effusive thanks with a shrug, as if rescuing foreigners from themselves was simply part of his Tuesday routine. He refused the zeppelins I offered, which still makes me feel slightly guilty about the quality of my gesture.

The key collection introduced us to Halina, who managed the property and spoke English with the confident unpredictability of someone who had learned it primarily from American films and British tourists. She walked us through everything with the pace of someone who had done this a thousand times but still found small ways to amuse herself. The boiler, she explained, was "very sensitive, like a poet." The neighbour's cat was "a criminal, but small crimes only." When she discovered Dave had tried his shortcut because he distrusted main roads, she looked at him with the expression my grandmother reserved for people who wore outdoor shoes indoors. "You," she said, "I will see again, I think. People like you always come back with problems."

She was not wrong. By Thursday we needed her help with the washing machine, which Dave had somehow convinced to display an error code that did not exist in the manual. Halina arrived with her husband, a man called Wojtek who communicated almost exclusively through meaningful silences and the occasional raised eyebrow. He fixed the machine in four minutes without speaking a word, then spent twenty minutes showing Dave his collection of vintage fishing lures, holding each one up for inspection as if presenting evidence in court. Dave, who has never fished in his life, nodded with the desperate enthusiasm of someone being polite at a party.

Our other neighbour, an elderly woman called Pani Jadwiga, appeared each morning with offerings from her garden. Tomatoes that tasted properly of something. Cucumbers the size of my forearm. She never knocked, simply materialised at the terrace edge, thrust vegetables at whichever of us was visible, and retreated before proper thanks could be offered. On our final day I caught her early enough to attempt gratitude in my broken Polish. She patted my arm, said something I did not understand, and pressed an extra tomato into my hand with the firmness of someone administering medicine.

I keep that tomato in my memory more than any photograph. It represented something about the place, about Bogdan abandoning his fence and Wojtek's silent lure exhibition and Halina's predictions of our incompetence. Rowy itself is quiet, a small coastal settlement with a beach that stretches properly and forests that smell of pine and damp earth. But what stays with me are these small human collisions, the way people responded to our arrival not with the polished indifference of tourist professionals but with something more particular, more themselves.

Dave still insists his shortcut would have worked eventually. I have not bothered arguing. We are, I suspect, exactly the kind of people Halina expects to see again, and I find I do not mind that at all.