I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send us through what looked like someone's cabbage patch. There we were, three hours out of Gdansk, two children asking if we were nearly there for the forty-seventh time, and me stubbornly following a voice that clearly thought "Raciaski Mlyn" was somewhere in the next field over. My partner Dave shot me that look. You know the one. The "I told you to download the offline maps" look. I ignored him, naturally, which is how we ended up reversing half a mile down a farm track while a very patient man on a tractor watched with what I can only describe as deeply Polish amusement.

The actual approach, once we found it, made the detachment worthwhile. You come round a bend through proper Kashubian woodland, all pine and birch and that particular hush you only get when you're properly away from things, and suddenly there's this converted mill sitting beside a stream with a water wheel still turning. I actually said "oh" out loud, which the children found hilarious. Dave just nodded, which is his version of admitting I might have got something right.

Raciaski Mlyn has that lovely thing where it looks properly old from the outside, all timber and stone and slightly wonky roofline, but inside someone's clearly spent time making it actually comfortable. Not boutique hotel uncomfortable, where you're afraid to sit down. Proper comfortable. The kind of place with a massive farmhouse table in the kitchen, squashy sofas you disappear into, and a wood burner that the owner had already got going for us. The children made a beeline for the loft bedroom, which has those little dormer windows perfect for spying on the garden, while I stood in the kitchen and felt that particular shoulders-dropping relief of being somewhere that genuinely feels like a break.

The owner, a chap called Tomek with excellent English and even better patience for my attempts at Polish pronunciation, had left us a loaf of bread and some local cheese. Not fancy artisan stuff with a story card. Just good bread and cheese that tasted like it came from nearby, which of course it had. We ate it standing at the kitchen counter in our coats because we hadn't even unpacked yet, too busy looking out at the garden sloping down to where the stream runs. There's a little wooden bench down there that became my morning spot over the week. Coffee, mist rising off the water, occasional duck. The children discovered the tree swing on the first afternoon and argued about whose turn it was for approximately six days solid.

What I hadn't expected, and what I kept thinking about that first evening, was how immediately slow everything felt. Not in a boring way. In a deliberate way. We'd brought board games and books and walking boots, and within hours none of us had looked at a screen. The WiFi exists, Tomek had mentioned casually, as if it were an embarrassing relative best not discussed. We used it once to check the weather forecast, then forgot about it. The children built an elaborate dam in the stream. Dave read an actual novel, something I hadn't seen in years. I cooked terrible Polish dumplings from a recipe Tomek's mother had handwritten, which the children heroically pretended to enjoy.

That first night, after the children finally collapsed in the loft, Dave and I sat by the wood burner with the last of the local beer and listened to the water wheel turning outside. "Not bad," he said. "For somewhere you found on the internet." I let it go. Some victories speak for themselves.