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 vegetable patch. Twelve hours after leaving Manchester, my partner and I were crawling along a dirt track somewhere in Masuria, convinced we'd either find our holiday let or accidentally invade a small farm. The mishap, when it came, was almost embarrassingly small: I got out to check a signpost, tripped over absolutely nothing, and landed face-first in a patch of stinging nettles. There I was, middle-aged man in a nice polo shirt, rolling around in a Polish hedgerow like I'd never encountered greenery before. My partner found this hilarious. I found it less so, particularly twenty minutes later when my left ankle started to itch in seven different places.

But then we rounded the final bend, and there was Woryty itself, and suddenly the nettles seemed a small price to pay.

The property sits on the edge of Lake Wulpinskie, which I later learned is properly called Wulpinskie though everyone local seems to pronounce it slightly differently each time. We pulled onto the gravel drive as evening light was doing that golden thing across the water, and I remember thinking that no amount of Instagram preparation could have readied me for how genuinely peaceful it looked. The house is a traditional Masurian style, wooden elements, that practical Baltic architecture that knows about proper winters, and it managed to look both substantial and somehow tucked into the landscape at the same time.

My first job, obviously, was finding the key safe while trying not to scratch my nettle patches in front of any passing neighbours. The instructions had seemed cryptic back in rainy Britain; here, with pine scent in the air and a heron watching me suspiciously from the lake edge, they felt almost mystical. I fumbled the code twice. Third time lucky, the box clicked open, and I felt disproportionately proud of this small achievement, as if I'd personally constructed the locking mechanism.

Inside, the place smelled of wood polish and something else I couldn't identify, something clean and lake-ish. The living area opens straight onto views of the water through generous windows, and I stood there like a complete tourist, mouth slightly open, while my partner started the important business of testing whether the sofa was comfortable. It was. She had already claimed the corner spot before I'd finished admiring the wooden ceiling beams.

The kitchen proved immediately practical in that way holiday kitchens sometimes aren't. Proper sharp knives, which matters more than you might think when you've been driving all day and fancy making something simple with local ingredients. We'd stopped at a supermarket in Olsztyn and bought too much, the usual holiday over-enthusiasm, including some local sausage I couldn't properly pronounce and a cheese that the woman behind the counter had described with a shrug that I chose to interpret as approval.

I unpacked badly, as I always do, spreading possessions across every flat surface while claiming I was "just organising." My partner rolled her eyes with the practised patience of someone who has seen this performance many times. But there was something about the space, the high ceilings and the way sound carried differently near water, that made even my usual chaotic unpacking feel like part of a ritual rather than simply messy.

By the time we opened the wine on the terrace, the nettle stings had faded to a mild background irritation and the heron had given up watching us. The lake was settling into that particular stillness that lakes find in early evening, and somewhere across the water a dog barked once, then thought better of it. We didn't talk much. We'd done enough talking in the car, enough singing along to bad radio, enough debating whether the sat nav was possessed or merely mischievous.

I remember thinking, as the light finally went and the first stars appeared with that startling clarity you get away from cities, that first impressions are strange things. I'd arrived scratched, sweaty, slightly carsick, and thoroughly unglamorous. Yet sitting there, with the particular quiet of Masuria settling around us like something tangible, I felt something shift and loosen. The journey's discomforts had become, already, part of the story we would tell. The nettles were funny now, or almost funny, and the house felt less like a rental and more like somewhere we might genuinely belong for a while.

Tomorrow we would explore properly, maybe try the rowing boat that came with the property, perhaps walk to the nearby village for bread and more of that mysterious cheese. But that first evening was simply for arriving, for letting the long miles drain away, for noticing how completely different a place can feel from home without feeling alien.

I scratched my ankle one final time, raised my glass to the darkness over the lake, and decided that getting slightly lost and falling into vegetation was probably the perfect way to begin.