I should have known the Polish autumn was going to have its say in our journey to Koscierzyna. We'd packed the car at Gdansk Lech Walesa Airport with the confident optimism of people who had checked a weather app once and called it research. My partner was in charge of navigation, I was in charge of snacks, and between us we had managed to forget the actual house keys back at the car hire desk. This realisation came precisely as the first proper downpour of our trip began, somewhere on the S6 where the pine forests close in and the road signs start looking reassuringly foreign.

Three hours later than planned, we finally pulled up to the property on the outskirts of Koscierzyna. The rain had softened to that persistent, soaking drizzle that defines a Kashubian October. I stepped out of the car directly into a puddle that came over the top of my supposedly waterproof boots. My partner tried not to laugh. I could see her trying.

But here's the thing about arriving in Kashubia at this time of year. The damp gets into everything, yes, but so does something else entirely. The house sat among trees that had turned the kind of gold and burnt orange you cannot properly photograph. Mist hung between the trunks. The wooden exterior of the property had darkened with the season's moisture, giving it that particular silvery-brown colour of Scandinavian pine left to weather naturally. It looked settled, rooted, as if it had been waiting through many autumns for people foolish enough to forget their keys.

Inside, the difference was immediate. The heating had been on, presumably for days, preparing for guests. The air smelled of warm timber and something faintly resinous from the surrounding forest. I stood in the entrance in my sodden socks, suddenly aware that my dramatic sighs about the journey had become irrelevant. The season outside made the warmth inside feel earned rather than merely convenient.

We had chosen this particular week deliberately, chasing what a Polish colleague had called the "golden autumn" before the real cold sets in. What I had not understood was how actively the season would participate in our stay. That first evening, we walked barely two hundred metres down a track behind the house. The ground was soft with fallen needles and leaves, muffling every footstep. The light failed earlier than I expected, not the gradual English dimming I was used to but something more decisive, as if someone was drawing curtains across the sky. We turned back not because we were cold, though we were, but because the dark came on with enough purpose to remind us we were visitors in a landscape preparing for winter.

The kitchen became our headquarters that first night. Cooking with ingredients from a small shop in Koscierzyna town, maybe three kilometres away, we ate pierogi and listened to rain against the windows with the particular rhythm it develops on wooden walls. My wet boots sat by the door, slowly surrendering their moisture to the heated air. I kept looking at them, then out at the darkness where the trees were barely visible, understanding something I had not expected about this kind of travel. The season was not a backdrop. It was the main character, and we were simply adjusting our pace to match its requirements.

I fell asleep earlier than I had in months, the darkness outside complete, the house ticking as it cooled and warmed around us. The autumn of Kashubia had made its first impression not through any picturesque moment, but through the simple, insistent fact of its presence. We would spend the rest of the week learning to move at its speed.