I have never been so relieved to see a man with a wheelbarrow in my life.

The drive from Gdansk to Kartuzy had been straightforward enough, if you consider navigating Polish roundabouts in a hire car the size of a postage stamp straightforward. My partner Dave had insisted on doing all the driving, which suited me fine until I realised his confidence vastly exceeded his ability to read road signs in a language that looks like someone fell asleep on a keyboard. We made it to Kashubia in one piece, though, and the countryside was already working its magic. Pine forests, glacial lakes, the odd stork standing about like a bemused doorman. Proper northern Poland, this. Proper lovely.

The mishap came at the property itself. We'd been sent a key code, which Dave punched in with theatrical precision. The door clicked open, we stepped inside, and immediately I knew something was off. The furniture was different. The smell was wrong. There was a cat asleep on the sofa that definitely wasn't mentioned in the listing. Dave had opened the neighbour's house by mistake. Same key code, you see. The actual owner, a chap called Bogdan, emerged from his garden shed with a wheelbarrow full of potatoes and found us standing in his living room like a pair of startled deer, me clutching a bottle of Zywiec I'd already helped myself to from his fridge.

Bogdan didn't seem remotely bothered. He laughed, a proper belly laugh, and insisted we keep the beer. "First time someone break in and bring gift," he said, gesturing at the Zywiec. His English was patchy but his goodwill was fluent. He led us next door to the proper property, a charming wooden house with a proper Kashubian feel to it, and spent twenty minutes explaining the heating system in a mixture of Polish, German he remembered from school, and elaborate hand gestures. I understood perhaps thirty percent but nodded enthusiastically throughout.

The real characters started appearing once we'd settled. Bogdan's wife, Halina, appeared with a plate of pierogi she'd made that morning. She looked me up and down and declared, through Bogdan's translation, that I was "too thin for Polish winter" and would need feeding properly. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was September. She returned daily with something new. Sourdough bread, pickled herring, a jar of something purple that turned out to be elderberry jam. Each delivery came with a brief interrogation about our lives, our families, whether we planned children. Dave got off lightly. I received detailed advice about my biological clock, delivered with such warmth that I couldn't possibly take offence.

Across the lane lived Wojtek, a retired fisherman who sat on his porch from dawn till dusk watching the world. He spoke no English at all but insisted on conversation regardless. We'd pass him on our way out each morning and receive a ten-minute monologue about, we later gathered from Bogdan's amused translations, the weather patterns of 1987, the proper technique for smoking eel, and his ongoing feud with a local heron that kept stealing his bait. Wojtek's gestures were magnificent. The heron was apparently a particular villain, and Wojtek's impression of it swooping down had me in stitches every single time.

The woman who ran the small shop in Kartuzy centre, perhaps ten minutes' walk away, became another regular encounter. I never caught her name but her scepticism was unforgettable. She'd eye our purchases with visible judgement. Too much beer, too little vegetables. One morning I bought only bread and milk and she actually tsked, shaking her head and saying something that needed no translation. The next day I added some apples and received a nod of grudging approval. Small victories.

Evening walks around the nearby lake brought us into contact with a group of older chaps who gathered at a particular bench to drink vodka and solve the world's problems. They waved us over one dusk, apparently deciding we looked sufficiently pathetic and lost. No English between them, but one produced a harmonica and played something mournful and beautiful while another, Jurek according to his friends' repeated shouts, attempted to teach Dave the proper way to drink vodka. "Not sip," Jurek kept saying, knocking his back with practised efficiency. Dave tried to comply and spent the following morning very quiet indeed.

What struck me most was how these encounters accumulated into something genuine. Nobody was performing for tourists. There weren't many tourists to perform for. We were simply neighbours for a week, and neighbours were treated with the same blunt kindness, the same intrusive concern, the same magnificent disregard for personal boundaries that the locals presumably extended to each other. Halina still sends me Facebook messages I cannot read. Bogdan has invited us back for potato harvest, whatever that entails. Wojtek's heron, I gather, remains undefeated.

I came to Kashubia expecting lakes and forests and quiet. I found all of that, certainly. But what stays with me is Bogdan's wheelbarrow, Halina's pierogi interrogations, Wojtek's heron impressions, and that shopkeeper's slowly warming approval. The place got under my skin because the people let us in, quite literally in Bogdan's case, and made a week in a wooden house in northern Poland feel like coming home to somewhere we'd never been before.