I have never been so grateful for heated seats in my life. We had been driving for what felt like fourteen hours but was probably closer to four, winding our way up through Jutland towards Djursland with the sort of grim determination that only a British person on a self-catering holiday can muster. The plan was simple: reach Oer Strand, locate our holiday home, collapse. What actually happened was that I misread the key collection instructions and sent us on a twenty-minute detour to what turned out to be a closed petrol station in the middle of absolutely nowhere. My partner sat in silence for most of it, which was somehow worse than shouting. March in Denmark does not reward optimists.

We arrived at the house just as the afternoon light was doing that flat, watery thing it does in early spring, all pale sky and no warmth whatsoever. The place sat low among the dunes, weatherboarded and sensible-looking, the sort of building that has seen every season roll through and remained thoroughly unimpressed. I loved it immediately. There was something about the way it hunkered down against the wind, all practicality and no pretence, that felt deeply appropriate for the time of year. This was not a summer-holiday house. This was a house for proper coats and thermos flasks and accepting that the beach would be an experience rather than a destination.

The first thing I noticed stepping inside was the smell. Not the musty, closed-up scent I had braced for, but something cleaner - pine and salt and that particular cold-weather freshness that comes from houses kept properly aired even in the off-season. The owners had left the heating on low, which felt like an act of genuine kindness rather than mere hospitality. March in Djursland hovers around five degrees, sometimes generous with sunshine, more often spiteful with horizontal rain. You do not want to arrive to a cold house. You want to arrive to warmth and the promise of a proper kitchen where you can cook something that steams.

I made straight for the windows, because that is what you do when you have driven past flat fields and bare trees for hours. The view stopped me properly. The Kattegat was doing its grey-green thing, choppy and uninviting, and the beach stretched away in both directions completely empty. No summer crowds, no ice cream kiosks, no optimistic Danes in swimming costumes. Just sand and water and the low scrub of the dunes, everything waiting. That is the thing about visiting Oer Strand in March. Nothing is performing for you. The place is simply itself, and you must meet it on those terms.

My partner had recovered enough from the key debacle to put the kettle on, and we stood there with our tea watching the light fade, neither of us saying much. I kept thinking about how different this would feel in July, when the same view would be busy with families and the water full of actual swimmers. I would probably love that too, in a different way. But there was something about this version, this stripped-back, honest season, that suited me better than I expected. I am not someone who naturally embraces discomfort. I like my holidays warm and straightforward. Yet here I was, genuinely content in a house by a cold sea in a country famous for being sensible about everything.

The wind picked up after dark, and we could hear it moving through the dune grass like something alive. We had brought board games and a bottle of red wine and the sort of food that requires slow cooking. The house had a wood-burning stove that we could not quite figure out, so we gave up and relied on the excellent central heating instead. There is a particular pleasure to being warm inside while the weather does its worst outside, especially when you know the beach will still be there in the morning, indifferent to your plans.

I fell asleep that first night with the sound of the sea through the open bedroom window, because apparently I am the sort of person who now sleeps with windows open in five-degree weather. The holiday had not even properly begun, and already I felt slightly changed, slightly more capable of accepting things as they are rather than as I would prefer them to be. March had brought me here, had stripped away the easy options, and I was unexpectedly grateful. The morning would bring coffee and a walk along that empty beach, and whatever weather decided to accompany us. I was ready to meet it, which is not something I could have said about myself four hours earlier, lost outside a closed petrol station with a silent partner and a growing sense of my own ridiculousness. Some journeys teach you patience whether you want to learn it or not.