I have never been so happy to see a set of windbreaks in my life. Four hours after leaving Billund airport, having taken a wrong turn somewhere near Aarhus that my phone insists was "a scenic alternative," we finally spotted the wooden sign for Oer Strand poking through the coastal pines. My partner was giving me the look. You know the one. The look that says "we agreed I'd navigate next time" without actually wasting breath on it.

The mishap, because there is always one, happened at a petrol station outside Randers. I had confidently marched inside, asked for "tak for kaffe" instead of whatever the actual phrase is for "petrol on pump four," and somehow walked out with a bag of liquorice allsorts and no receipt. The young lad behind the counter looked utterly baffled. I looked utterly baffled. My partner, watching from the car, just slowly lowered her head onto the steering wheel. We still do not know if I paid for the fuel. I have decided this is a problem for future me.

But then the cottage appeared through the trees, and all was forgiven. Oer Strand sits in that perfect Danish sweet spot where the forest leans right up to the dunes, and you can hear the Kattegat before you can see it. Our place was one of those classic Scandinavian timber cabins, all pale wood and sensible angles, with a deck that had clearly seen a thousand family barbecues and would see a thousand more. The key was in the lockbox exactly where the booking said. I felt disproportionately proud of this.

Inside smelled of pine and slightly damp wetsuits, which is precisely how a beach cottage should smell. The children thundered upstairs to claim beds before I had even set down the bags. There was the usual holiday cottage archaeology: mismatched mugs, a drawer full of takeaway menus from Aarhus that someone had thoughtfully collected, board games with crucial pieces missing. We found a half-used candle shaped like a fish. Nobody questioned it. That is cottage law.

I made the mistake of declaring I would "pop to the beach for a quick look" before unpacking. This was three hours ago. The beach at Oer Strand is not a quick-look sort of place. It is a shallow, shelving curve of pale sand that seems to go on forever at low tide, with proper Baltic chill to the water and those distinctive Danish summer houses lining the backshore in cheerful colours. The children immediately found a half-collapsed sandcastle to renovate. I found a spot to sit and pretend I was supervising while actually doing absolutely nothing. The liquorice allsorts emerged from the car. They were terrible, by the way. Danish liquorice operates on a completely different moral framework to British sweets.

By the time we dragged ourselves back, the light was doing that long northern evening thing where it simply refuses to quit. We cobbled together dinner from what we had brought: bread, some questionable cheese from the airport, tomatoes that had travelled better than we had. Ate on the deck with jumpers on because Denmark in summer is not a shorts-and-vest affair, not really. The children were already sandy-haired and slightly feral. Day one.

I keep thinking about that petrol station. About my mangled Danish and the lad's patient confusion. Travel does this, does it not? Strips you back to basics. You are suddenly someone who cannot operate a self-service till, who packs the wrong shoes, who needs a printed map because the phone has given up in protest. And somehow, sitting on a wooden deck with questionable cheese and tired children and the sound of the sea through the pines, that feels entirely acceptable. More than acceptable. It feels like exactly where we needed to be.

Tomorrow we will attempt the village shop. I will probably point at things and smile too much. There will be more sand, more sea, more of that particular Danish light that makes everything look slightly enchanted. But for now, the fish candle is burning, someone is snoring already, and I can hear the waves turning over down beyond the dunes. I have no idea if I paid for that petrol. I find I do not particularly care.