I should have known the holiday was off to a classic start when I confidently punched "Jamnowski Mlyn" into the sat nav and spent twenty minutes circling what turned out to be a tractor dealership just outside Gdansk. Turns out my pronunciation was so spectacularly wrong that even the machine gave up on me. There is a special kind of humility that comes from being outsmarted by technology in two languages at once.

The actual journey from the UK had been painless enough, a flight to Gdansk followed by a hire car that smelled faintly of pine air freshener and regret. Pomerania stretches out in that satisfyingly flat, green way that makes you feel like you have accidentally driven into a watercolour painting. Windmills, fields of rapeseed blazing yellow, and those long straight roads that seem to go on until they reach the Baltic itself. My partner had the map. The children had devices and headphones. I had my misplaced confidence and a growing suspicion I had left my swimming trunks on the bedroom floor at home.

We found the turning eventually, down a narrow lane where the trees meet overhead and the light goes green and dappled. The kind of lane where you immediately slow down because you know a tractor or a deer or an elderly man on a bicycle could appear at any moment. And then there it was, the old mill house sitting beside a proper working stream, the waterwheel still turning with that satisfying, unhurried clunk and splash that makes you want to sit down and do absolutely nothing for several hours.

The owners had left the key in the agreed place, which felt thrillingly rustic and faintly alarming in equal measure. The door opened with that particular groan that old wooden doors have, the one that says nobody has rushed through here in a very long time. Inside smelled of beeswax and dried herbs and that particular cool stone scent that no amount of modern heating can quite dispel. The children thundered upstairs to claim bedrooms before I had even set my bag down. My partner raised an eyebrow at the enormous fireplace and I knew exactly what she was thinking. Fire. Wine. Evening. Yes.

I will admit to a small moment of middle-class panic when I realised the kitchen ran on a proper range that needed coaxing into life, and that the nearest supermarket of any substance was a drive away. But that is the point of these places, is it not? The slight inconvenience that forces you to slow down, to plan a bit, to actually talk to each other while waiting for the kettle rather than scrolling through nonsense on a phone. We had brought sausages from a farm shop near the airport, and bread, and butter that actually tasted of something. The children moaned about the wifi being patchy until they discovered the stream and a rope swing that looked like it had been there since the war, which it probably had.

By evening we were sitting outside with those sausages and a bottle of Zywiec, watching bats appear against a sky that went from pink to deep blue without any of the light pollution that ruins things at home. The waterwheel kept turning. Somewhere an owl started up. My youngest fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, something that has not happened in two years and that I pretended not to notice while actually memorising every second of it.

I had come expecting a change of scenery. What I had not expected was how quickly the scenery would change me, or at least slow me down to something approaching a human pace again.