I had been driving for what felt like six hours when I realised my phone had been in aeroplane mode since Warsaw, which explained why Google Maps had been suspiciously quiet and why I had just done a full circuit of the same pine forest three times. My partner sat beside me with that particular expression of British patience that is actually just suppressed fury, and our boot contained a week's worth of Ocado-ready groceries that were slowly reaching room temperature.

We found the place eventually, down a track that looked like it had last seen a tarmac lorry in 1987. The property sat there like a well-fed cat, all timber beams and sensible Dutch angles, with a veranda that seemed to sag slightly in a welcoming rather than alarming way. I was still apologising about the aeroplane mode thing when the door opened and a man emerged who I initially assumed was the owner but who turned out to be Tadeusz, the neighbour, who had come to "check the foreigners had not died in the forest."

Tadeusz spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it exclusively from watching Midsomer Murders on satellite television. He informed us that the actual owner, his cousin's wife's brother, lived in Olsztyn and had left the key under a ceramic frog that Tadeusz then produced from his own pocket with a flourish, as if this were the most natural key custody arrangement in the world. The frog, he explained, was called Zbigniew. I did not ask further questions.

Within twenty minutes we had been introduced to three more people who materialised from various directions with the apparent telepathy of rural communities everywhere. There was Halina, who walked with a stick she had carved herself from birch and who immediately began a detailed critique of the property's guttering that suggested she had opinions about most things. There was young Krzysztof, who ran the small boat hire place on the lake and who communicated almost entirely through meaningful shrugs that Tadeusz translated for us with the authority of a UN interpreter. And there was Wladek, who appeared to simply live in the garden shed and who offered us pickled mushrooms within seconds of our introduction.

The mushrooms, I should say, were extraordinary. Wladek had gathered them himself from the forest I had so recently been circling in technological ignorance, and he watched us eat them with the intensity of a man whose entire self-worth rested on our reaction. I made appreciative noises that were probably too theatrical, and he nodded with satisfaction before launching into a story about his brother-in-law's tractor that lasted approximately forty minutes and required no contribution from us whatsoever.

Halina had taken against our hire car, a Fiat that she referred to as "the Italian mistake," and she spent much of the afternoon explaining why German engineering was the only sensible choice for Polish roads, which apparently included this particular track that was slowly destroying its suspension. She had owned an Opel Kadett in 1983 that had survived a flood, a fire, and what she termed "the incident with the potatoes," and nothing since had matched its reliability.

By evening we had been given a map hand-drawn on the back of a feed receipt, three different recommendations for where to buy the best kielbasa in Biskupiec, and a stern warning from Tadeusz about swimming in the lake before June on account of something he described as "the cold that makes your heart stop." Krzysztof shrugged meaningfully at this, which Tadeusz translated as agreement but which I suspected might have been commentary on Tadeusz himself.

We finally closed the door around nine, having achieved precisely none of the unpacking we had intended, and I stood in the kitchen listening to my partner laugh about something Wladek had said regarding his shed's previous life as a rabbit hutch. The timber creaked around us in that way old buildings do, settling into evening like an animal into bedding, and through the window I could see Halina's torch bobbing away down the track, presumably off to inspect someone else's guttering.

I thought about the aeroplane mode, the circling, the groceries we would now need to replace. I thought about how I had planned this trip with spreadsheets and reviews and careful optimisation, and how none of that had prepared me for Zbigniew the frog or Wladek's mushrooms or the particular cadence of Tadeusz's Midsomer Murders syntax. There is something in the British temperament that expects to arrive somewhere and remain slightly apart, observing from a comfortable distance, and there is something in rural Masuria that simply does not permit it.

My partner was already making tea with the efficiency of someone who had accepted our new circumstances, and I could hear Wladek singing something in the shed, off-key and contented. The lake would be there tomorrow, and the boats, and presumably more characters I had not yet met. For now I sat on the sagging veranda with a mug that said "I Heart Gdansk" and watched the darkness settle over the pines, feeling something I could not quite name except to know that it was not the feeling of being lost anymore.