The ferry from Ystad was barely out of the harbour when I realised I'd left the cottage directions on the kitchen table at home. Not in my email, not on my phone, not even scrawled on a napkin. Properly left behind, twelve miles across the Baltic, probably still stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a croissant. My wife gave me that look. You know the one. The one that says "I married this man voluntarily" without actually opening her mouth.

Three hours later we were trundling around Nexo in a hire car that smelled faintly of fish, two children asking if we were lost, me pretending I absolutely knew where Sandkas was because I'd "studied the map extensively." I had not studied the map extensively. I had glanced at it once while eating a packet of crisps. We found it eventually, down a sandy track near Balka Strand, after asking a man walking a dog who looked at us with the gentle pity reserved for obvious tourists.

And then there it was. A proper Bornholm timber cottage, all weathered wood and red roof tiles, surrounded by pine trees that seemed to lean in to have a look at us. The key was in the lockbox exactly where the booking confirmation I'd frantically dug out of my deleted items said it would be. I punched in the code with the theatrical confidence of someone who definitely hadn't just spent twenty minutes searching for it.

The door opened onto that particular smell of Danish summer houses. You know it if you know it. Wood, sea air, a hint of someone's grandmother's lavender cupboard, and the ghost of a thousand previous families' beach trips. The children bolted past me, arguing already about who got which bedroom, while I stood in the hallway feeling that lovely shift that happens when a holiday actually begins.

The living room had those enormous windows that seem to pull the outside in. Balka Strand was visible through the trees, that particular Baltic grey-blue that looks slightly unconvinced about being the sea. My wife found the kitchen and immediately started opening cupboards with the methodical determination of someone who needs to know where the wine glasses are before she can truly relax.

I will admit to a small moment of self-reflection there, standing in that sunlit room with my family already dispersing through the house. The directions debacle had been entirely my fault, obviously. I'd spent the ferry crossing making jokes about it rather than actually solving the problem. Classic me, really. But here we were. The cottage was warm, slightly ramshackle in that deliberate Danish way, and ours for the week.

The children reappeared to announce they'd found a badminton set in the shed and could we play immediately despite it being nearly teatime and nobody knowing where the shuttlecocks were. My wife emerged with two glasses and a bottle she'd discovered in a cupboard, raising an eyebrow that suggested she'd already decided to forgive me. Outside, the Bornholm light was doing that golden thing it does in late afternoon, turning the pine trunks amber and making the sand track glow like someone had sprinkled it with something precious.

I found the shuttlecocks eventually. They were in a flowerpot on the windowsill, because of course they were. We played badly, laughed loudly, and I let my daughter win by a margin she found convincing. When we finally went back inside, sandy-footed and slightly sunburned, the cottage had settled into itself around us. Someone's abandoned jumper on the sofa. A half-built Lego spaceship on the coffee table. The distant sound of my wife humming in the kitchen.

That first evening, we ate outside on the little wooden deck, wrapped in blankets because the Baltic breeze had turned brisk. The children fell asleep at the table, which never happens at home. I carried them to bed, one at a time, their warm weight against my shoulder, and thought about how I'd nearly ruined the whole arrival with my spectacular inability to remember a simple set of directions.

But I hadn't, had I? The cottage didn't care. The pines didn't care. Bornholm certainly didn't care. We were here, and that was enough, and sometimes the wrong turn leads you exactly where you needed to be.