I have never been so relieved to see a wooden fence in my life. After six hours of driving from Krakow, complete with a sat-nav that apparently thought "shortest route" meant "most terrifying mountain track imaginable," we finally spotted the sign for our Poronin. My partner Dave was gripping the steering wheel like it owed him money, and I had just spent the last twenty minutes convinced we were about to become a local legend: "The English Couple Who Tried to Drive Up a Riverbed."

The mishap came right at the end, naturally. I spotted what I thought was the driveway and enthusiastically directed Dave to turn. What followed was the unmistakable sound of a Skoda Octavia meeting a drainage ditch at precisely the wrong angle. We were not, as it turned out, in the driveway. We were in a farm access track belonging to a man whose expression suggested this was not his first encounter with lost tourists. Through a combination of broken Polish, elaborate hand gestures, and what I can only describe as vehicular shame, we extracted ourselves. The actual entrance was fifteen metres further on. Dave did not speak to me for a full four minutes.

But then we saw it properly, and the ditch faded from memory. Our Poronin sat there like something from a storybook, all honey-coloured timber and steep pitched roofs, with flower boxes that looked almost aggressively picturesque. The Tatra Mountains rose behind it in layers of blue and grey, close enough that I kept checking if they were somehow a backdrop. They were not. They were simply that enormous.

We had arrived in late June expecting the walking weather to be straightforward. Sun, warmth, perhaps a gentle breeze. The forecast had promised this. The forecast, I now believe, was written by someone who had never visited southern Poland in summer. Within an hour of unloading our cases, the sky performed what I can only describe as a theatrical production. Brilliant sunshine gave way to bruised purple clouds, then a warm drizzle, then sunshine again, all while remaining somehow humid throughout. I changed outfits three times before dinner and began to understand why the locals carried rucksacks containing what appeared to be entire meteorological stations.

The next morning we set out for our first walk, aiming for a trail that wound through meadowland toward the lower forested slopes. The path began practically at our doorstep, which felt impossibly civilised. We passed wooden shepherd huts with smoking chimneys, the air thick with the smell of woodsmoke and wild herbs. Within half a mile I had already taken forty-seven photographs of the same mountain from marginally different angles. Dave stopped commenting after the twentieth.

The weather turned again precisely as we reached a clearing with views down the valley. What had been a pleasant amble in shirtsleeves became a hurried rummage for waterproofs while rain fell in warm, heavy drops that somehow managed to soak through every gap in our supposedly breathable clothing. We sheltered beneath a pine tree that offered approximately twelve percent coverage and laughed like idiots. There is something about being inadequately dressed in foreign weather that strips away any pretence of competence. We were not serious hikers. We were two people from Derbyshire who had packed optimistically and were now learning humility one precipitation event at a time.

When the rain passed, steam rose from the path in wisps. The forest smelled of warmed resin and wet earth. We continued, adjusting our route to stick lower down rather than attempting anything ambitious. The changing conditions had forced a kind of flexibility I do not naturally possess. I am a planner, a spreadsheet person, someone who finds comfort in certainty. Walking those trails, with the weather doing whatever it pleased and our route shifting accordingly, I felt something loosen. Not dramatically. Not permanently. Just enough to notice.

We returned to the Poronin as afternoon light slanted through the windows, everything in the timber interior glowing amber. Our boots sat steaming on the porch. Dave made tea while I stood in the garden watching another cloud formation gather and disperse over the peaks, already planning tomorrow's walk with revised expectations and an additional pair of socks. Some holidays teach you about a place. This one was teaching me something about showing up anyway, about the walks that happen when the weather does not cooperate, about finding the path even when you start in a drainage ditch.