The ferry from Bittenfeld to Als was meant to be the easy bit. I had done the hard part: packed the car with enough supplies to survive a small siege, negotiated with the children about screen time limits, and remembered to switch the heating off at home. What I had not done, in my smug state of organisational triumph, was check which port the ferry actually left from. We sat in the wrong car park for twenty minutes, watching seagulls fight over a discarded chip, before a kindly local tapped on my window and pointed us toward the proper terminal with the patient expression of someone who had seen this exact scene play out a hundred times before.

By the time we reached Lavensby, I was in that peculiar state of frazzled determination that passes for holiday spirit. The lane narrowed to little more than a tractor track, hedgerows brushing both wing mirrors, and I began to wonder if the satnav had developed a grudge against me. Then the trees opened up and there it was: a proper Danish farmhouse, red-tiled and white-trimmed, sitting in a meadow that sloped gently down toward the sound. The children had fallen asleep in the back, of course, mouths open, crumbs everywhere, completely missing the grand arrival I had imagined.

My first impression of the place was actually the smell. Not the sea, though that came later, but the sweet, cut-grass scent of the garden and something else - woodsmoke, perhaps, from a neighbour's chimney. The owner had left the key in a little ceramic pot shaped like a hedgehog, which my daughter immediately claimed as her personal treasure and refused to let anyone else touch for the remainder of the week.

The kitchen was the heart of it, as these places always are. A long pine table worn pale at the edges, a window that looked straight out to where small boats sat tilted on their moorings. I put the kettle on out of sheer habit, though what I really needed was something stronger. The children woke up disoriented and immediately began arguing about who would have which bedroom, a negotiation that involved running up and down stairs and a near-miss with a low beam that I am still grateful nobody actually connected with.

I stood in that kitchen with my tea going cold and watched a heron lift off from the water's edge, slow and unbothered, and felt something in my shoulders begin to loosen. It is strange, isn't it, how you can plan a holiday for months and the moment that stays with you is the accidental one: the wrong car park, the sleeping children, the heron, the particular quality of late afternoon light falling across a table that has seen a thousand family breakfasts before yours.

The mishaps did not stop there, naturally. The barbecue took three attempts to light. Someone trod on the ceramic hedgehog. We discovered that the nearest proper shop was a drive away and that we had forgotten the ketchup. But standing in that garden as evening came on, the sound of my lot laughing about something I had missed while I wrestled with charcoal, I thought: this is the thing. The getting there, the almost-not-getting-there, the chaos of ordinary life transplanted somewhere new. We did not need to be anywhere else. We were already exactly where we needed to be.