I have never been so relieved to see a windbreak in my entire life.

The drive from Aarhus Airport to Fuglso Strand had been textbook Danish countryside: flat fields, tidy farmhouses, the occasional cyclist looking morally superior in the drizzle. My partner and I were buzzing for our week in a proper Danish holiday home, the sort with pine cladding and a terrace that promised sunset beers. What we had not properly accounted for was the British weather we had apparently packed in our suitcases along with our waterproofs.

The mishap came within ten minutes of arrival. I was reversing our hire car into the property's gravel drive, feeling rather pleased with myself for remembering which side of the road to use, when there was a distinct crunch. Not the car. Worse. The wooden post supporting the boundary marker. It listed at a forty-five degree angle like a drunk sailor, and I sat there gripping the steering wheel, waiting for an angry Dane to emerge from the neighbouring gorse. Nobody came. The post remained drunkenly askew for our entire stay, a silent monument to my spatial awareness.

The holiday home itself was lovely, mind you. All clean lines and that particular Scandinavian brightness that makes you feel you should be a better person. We dumped our bags and did what any self-respecting British holidaymaker does: immediately set off for a walk despite the threatening sky.

Fuglso Strand sits on the Kalo Bay coastline, and the walking is genuinely glorious when the weather permits. We headed south along the coastal path towards Kalo Castle ruins, a thirteenth-century fortress that sounds more impressive than the scattered stones remaining, though the views across the bay compensate handsomely. The heathland here is proper Nordic stuff: low shrubs, sandy soil underfoot, that particular muted colour palette that makes you understand why Scandinavians get excited about a single yellow flower.

The rain started precisely as we reached the most exposed point of the headland. Not Danish drizzle, which one almost respects for its persistence, but full British stair-rod stuff, the kind that finds every gap in your supposedly waterproof jacket. We squelched back, me still smarting from my parking triumph, and spent the evening drying socks on the holiday home's radiators while eating supermarket rye bread and pretending this was exactly the hygge experience we had wanted.

Day two dawned suspiciously clear. We were not fooled. We set off north this time, towards the Begtrup Vig area, with packed lunches and the grim determination of people who refuse to let meteorology defeat them. The path winds through coastal meadows where sheep graze right to the cliff edges, apparently unconcerned by either the drop or the weather. We walked for hours, proper hiking-boots-and-flask stuff, and it was magnificent. The Baltic stretched grey and silver to the horizon, and for whole stretches we saw nobody at all.

Of course it caught us again. A squall blew in from nowhere, sending us scurrying for a fishing shed that smelled powerfully of cod and diesel. We huddled there, laughing at our own predictability, two Brits abroad who had travelled six hundred miles to experience precisely the same weather we get in Norfolk.

By midweek we developed a system. Morning walks regardless, afternoon retreats to the holiday home's sauna when the inevitable arrived. The property's terrace saw actual use on exactly one evening, when we sat with wine and watched clouds build over the water like a threat. We toasted our own stubbornness.

The gentle self-reflection came on our final morning, walking the local beach at low tide. I realised I had spent the whole week battling the elements rather than accepting them, treating Danish weather as a personal affront rather than simply the price of empty paths and dramatic skies. The angled boundary post, still unrepaired, seemed suddenly apt: my own small disruption in a landscape that would outlast me by centuries.

We left the spare key where instructed, loaded our still-damp boots into the boot, and drove away with the heater blasting. I would do it all again tomorrow, though perhaps with better reversing skills and lower expectations of sunshine. Some holidays teach you about a place; this one taught me mostly about myself, and the peculiar British compulsion to march into rain while complaining about it.