I have never been so relieved to see a wooden gate in all my life. Twelve hours after leaving Leeds, two flights, one very questionable airport sandwich, and a hire car whose satnav seemed to think we fancied a scenic tour of every cabbage field between Gdansk and our final destination, we finally crunched up the gravel drive of what I desperately hoped was Brzezno Szlacheckie.

The mishap, because there is always one with us, happened roughly forty minutes earlier. My partner had insisted on navigating the last stretch himself, waving away my phone with its increasingly hysterical Google Maps voice. "I know where I'm going," he said, with the confidence of a man who absolutely did not. We ended up in a farmyard three villages over, surrounded by extremely interested geese and one enormous dog who appeared to be half bear. The farmer, bless him, found this hilarious. He leaned on his fence, smoked an entire cigarette while watching us execute a seventeen-point turn, and eventually pointed us back toward Brzezno with gestures so expansive he nearly took out his own washing line.

So when that wooden gate actually matched the photograph on my booking confirmation, I may have let out a small noise that was part laugh, part sob.

The house sits among trees that I later learned were mostly beech and oak, though at that moment they were simply green and welcoming and not geese. A proper Kashubian rural house, all timber and character, with a steep roof that looked like it meant business. The sort of place that makes you immediately conscious of how crumpled you are after a journey, how strongly you smell of petrol station coffee, how utterly unprepared you look for the countryside.

Our host emerged before I could even reach for the door handle, which I appreciated because my legs had gone that peculiar numb they do after too long in a car. She was wiping her hands on an apron and smiling in a way that suggested she had witnessed many arrivals like ours, though perhaps not quite so delayed or goose-adjacent. Her Polish was rapid and musical; my phrasebook Polish was neither. We managed. There is something wonderfully grounding about communicating through gestures, exaggerated politeness, and the universal language of pointing at things and looking hopeful.

She showed us round with evident pride, and I found myself relaxing in increments. The wooden beams inside were darker and more ancient than I expected, smelling of beeswax and something else I could not place, something that made me think of my grandmother's pantry thirty years ago. I had not expected to be hit by that particular memory, standing in a stranger's hallway in Kashubia, but there it was. Travel does this, I reminded myself. Sneaks up on you with things you had filed away.

The kitchen window looked out onto nothing but meadow and distant woodland. No neighbours visible. No road noise. Just birdsong that sounded almost aggressively loud after years of city living. I stood there with my rucksack still on, suddenly aware of how much mental noise I had been carrying, how automatically I had been bracing for the next thing to go wrong.

My partner appeared with two mugs of tea he had somehow produced from nowhere, and we stood in that window like a pair of proper idiots, grinning at each other, at the meadow, at the profound relief of having finally, actually arrived.

The geese, I decided, could wait for tomorrow's story.