I have never been so pleased to see a sign with a picture of a stork on it. After six hours of driving from Poznan, two wrong turns near Szczecin, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted the road through a cabbage field was a legitimate route, that wooden welcome board on the edge of Nowe Warpno felt like spotting an old friend.

The mishap came about ten minutes before we found the place. I had insisted, with the confidence of a man who had once successfully navigated from Bristol to Bath, that I knew a shortcut. My partner, ever patient, had humoured me. This shortcut took us down a gravel track between pine trees, past a man walking a very large pig on a lead, and ultimately to a dead end at a locked gate with a sign that I now believe said something like "private fishing, go away" but which I initially misread as "charming lake path this way." We had to reverse for nearly half a mile, which in a hired estate car with visibility comparable to a submarine's periscope was not my finest hour. I laughed first, which is always a dangerous sign. My partner laughed second, which meant I was forgiven, though the pig man gave us a look I shall not forget.

The holiday home itself sits on a quiet street a short stroll from the Szczecin Lagoon, and arriving felt like stepping into one of those watercolour paintings your aunt has in her guest toilet. The house is a traditional Pomeranian style, all pale plaster and steep roof, with a small garden that had clearly been loved by someone with more horticultural patience than I shall ever possess. There were roses, actual roses, climbing something. I do not know what. A trellis? Is that the word? I felt immediately inadequate and determined to sit near them with a beer.

The key was where promised, in a little lockbox that I fumbled with for longer than I care to admit, dropping it twice onto a stone path that seemed designed specifically to make things clatter embarrassingly. A neighbour appeared at a window, watched for a moment, then vanished with what I choose to believe was sympathetic understanding rather than judgement.

Inside, the place smelled of pine and clean linen, that particular holiday rental scent that always makes me slightly emotional in a way I cannot properly explain. The living area had proper wooden beams, not the fake kind that people glue to ceilings in new builds, but actual old beams that had witnessed decades of Polish summers. I ran my hand along one and immediately felt the need to say something profound, managed only "blimey, that's old," and moved on to inspecting the kitchen with the intensity of a man who cooks approximately twice yearly but considers himself something of an expert.

The kitchen opened to a terrace, and stepping out there was the moment the whole journey compressed into something worthwhile. The garden, that modest Pomeranian garden with its roses and its tidy lawn, caught the late afternoon light in a way that made the six hours, the cabbage field, the pig, the reversing, all of it, seem like necessary preamble. Beyond the fence, you could sense the lagoon nearby, that particular flat water horizon that this corner of Poland does so well.

I unpacked badly, leaving most things in suitcases as if we might need to flee at any moment, a habit from city living that dies hard. My partner arranged things properly, because someone must. By evening we were on that terrace with local beer, watching the sky do that prolonged northern sunset thing where it takes ages to actually get dark and you keep thinking "surely now" and it keeps not happening.

A stork flew over, presumably the same one from the welcome sign, doing a shift change. I raised my can to it. The pig man would have judged me, but the stork did not, and that was enough.