I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through what looked suspiciously like someone's vegetable patch. There I was, halfway through a fourteen-hour drive from Dover, convinced I was about to become the first British tourist to plough through a Polish allotment. Turns out the proper road was fifty metres to the left, hidden behind a hedge that had clearly grown with malicious intent. My partner just sat there, stirring his cold coffee, saying "I did mention that turn looked too small" for approximately the fifteenth time since Belgium.

We finally rolled into Biskupiec as the afternoon light was doing that golden thing that makes even a tired Renault Scenic look almost romantic. The property sat back from a quiet lane, all wooden beams and sensible Polish practicality, with a garden that smelled of cut grass and the faint promise of a barbecue. I stepped out, stretched my legs, and promptly walked into a low branch that the previous owners had presumably installed for entertainment purposes. First impressions: the house was lovely, my spatial awareness less so.

The plan, hatched during a rainy Tuesday in Croydon, had been gloriously simple. We would walk. Everywhere. Masuria in summer meant lakeside trails, forest paths, that particular hush you get when pine needles cushion your footsteps. I had packed three pairs of walking socks and a determination that bordered on the religious.

Morning one dawned bright and almost insultingly perfect. We set off toward the nearest stretch of coastline along Lake Krzywe, me in new boots that I had not quite broken in, my partner with a rucksack containing enough water for a desert crossing. The path wound through birch woods, occasional clearings giving glimpses of water that shifted between green and blue depending on the clouds. We passed a fisherman who nodded gravely, as if acknowledging fellow pilgrims, though his actual catch seemed to consist entirely of patience and cigarettes.

By afternoon the weather had turned theatrical. The sky, previously a cheerful blank blue, piled up with clouds that looked personally offended. We had perhaps forty minutes of warning, that particular stillness that makes birds go quiet, before the rain arrived with the enthusiasm of a guest who has heard there is free wine. My so-called waterproof jacket proved to be waterproof in roughly the same way a colander is watertight. We squelched back to the house, me developing a blister in exactly the spot where my new boots had seemed fine during a brisk walk around the retail park.

The following days became a negotiation with the local climate, which appeared to change its mind hourly out of sheer caprice. We would set out in sunshine, reach some promising viewpoint, then find ourselves jogging through sudden showers that turned paths to streams. I began to regard the weather app on my phone with the same scepticism I usually reserve for horoscopes. My partner, who has always possessed an irritating talent for contentment, simply produced a pack of cards from somewhere and suggested we wait out a particularly persistent downpour in a lakeside shelter built, I suspect, by someone who understood Polish summers.

There was something in this rhythm of walking, waiting, walking again that I had not expected. The trails near Biskupiec do not announce themselves with drama; they simply exist, connecting villages and lakes through woods where mushrooms appear overnight and dragonflies hang motionless above damp meadows. I found myself paying attention to smaller things, the particular sound of rain on different leaves, how the light fell through oak branches after a storm had passed.

On our final morning we walked a loop we had attempted twice before, abandoned twice due to weather, and completed it in a mist that turned the lake into something approximate to a watercolour half-finished. My boots had finally moulded to my feet, my jacket had given up any pretence and been replaced by a local purchase that actually worked. We saw no one for an hour, just the soft drip of water from branches and the occasional fish breaking the surface with what sounded, to my perhaps over-romantic ears, like contentment.

I came to Biskupiec with a plan and a timetable, and left with damp socks and a slightly better understanding of how little that matters. The walking was sometimes glorious, sometimes merely wet, but always particular to that place, those lakes, that unreliable sky. My partner still mentions the vegetable patch incident at dinner parties. I let him. Some things you simply have to own.