I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Nowe Warpno did not disappoint. We had been driving through Pomerania for the better part of six hours, my partner navigating while I confidently insisted I knew exactly where our holiday home was. Reader, I did not. We ended up down a sandy track near the Szczecin Lagoon, surrounded by pine trees and the distinct feeling that Google Maps had given up on us entirely. The comedy peaked when I reversed into a bush, scattering what I can only describe as an unreasonable number of startled ducks. My partner laughed so hard she nearly dropped her phone into a puddle.

By the time we found the actual property, tucked along a quiet lane near the water, I had aged approximately ten years. But then I stepped out of the car, and something shifted. The air smelled of pine resin and something briny from the lagoon. A warm breeze moved through the trees. Our little wooden house sat there looking terribly pleased with itself, all tidy decking and welcoming windows. I forgot about the ducks almost immediately.

We dumped our bags with the chaotic energy of people who had been in a car too long, then did what any sensible person would do. We walked. The coast here is not dramatic cliffs or crashing Atlantic waves. It is something gentler, more honest. Muddy paths through reeds, the occasional creak of a fishing boat, stretches of sand where you half expect to find nothing and are rewarded with herons standing like grumpy old men in the shallows. That first evening we wandered barely a mile, just getting our bearings, and I remember thinking that this was exactly what my shoulders needed. They had been up around my ears since the duck incident.

The next morning we set out properly, armed with water and the optimistic belief that Polish summer weather would behave itself. It did not. We had planned a long loop along the lagoon shore, through the wetlands that fringe this part of Pomerania, maybe stopping at one of the tiny villages that dot the coast. The morning started glorious, warm sun on our backs, butterflies doing whatever butterflies do when they are happy. We walked perhaps three miles, chatting nonsense, pointing at birds we could not identify. Then the sky turned the colour of a bad decision and the warm breeze became something more insistent.

Rain in Pomerania does not arrive politely. It announces itself, settles in, makes itself comfortable. We were caught on an exposed stretch of path with no shelter in sight, and within minutes we were the kind of wet that gets into your attitude, not just your clothes. My partner, who has never met an optimistic forecast she did not believe, looked at me with the expression of someone whose weather app had betrayed her. We squelched back, taking a shortcut through some woods that may or may not have been entirely legitimate, emerging near our property looking like two people who had lost a fight with a lake.

Here is the gentle reflection part, then. I stood on the decking that evening, still damp, drinking tea that tasted of pine needles because we had nothing else, and I watched the weather clear as quickly as it had arrived. The lagoon went back to being peaceful. The warm air returned, carrying midges and the sound of a distant cockerel. I realised I had spent the first day of this holiday trying to make it into something structured, a proper walk with a proper destination, and instead I had got lost, rained on, and slightly attacked by vegetation. It was better than what I had planned. The mishaps were the thing.

The rest of the week we walked more carefully, with waterproofs stuffed in bags and no particular route in mind. We found a beach where the sand squeaked underfoot, and another path where the reeds grew taller than my head. The warm weather came and went like a cat that cannot decide if it wants to be inside, and we learned to set out early, to read the sky, to not trust anything my phone said about precipitation. On our last morning we walked to a viewpoint we had missed entirely on that first chaotic day, and the lagoon stretched out looking entirely too beautiful for something so close to Germany that you could probably swim there if you were keen and slightly foolish.

I came back with muddy boots, a slightly sunburned nose, and the certain knowledge that next time I will check the map before I check my own confidence. The ducks, I suspect, have not forgotten me either.