I have never been so relieved to see a fjord in all my life, and that includes the time I got lost in Norway and nearly ended up in a glacier crevasse. The drive to Hjarbaek Fjord had started well enough - smooth run up through East Jutland, lovely views of rolling farmland, me smugly thinking I had beaten the sat nav at its own game by taking what looked like a shortcut near Viborg.

The shortcut turned out to be a farm track. A very long farm track. One that ended in a field of particularly judgmental-looking dairy cows who watched me perform a seventeen-point turn while my passenger, my sister, offered unhelpful commentary about my life choices. By the time we found proper tarmac again, we were both in that peculiar state of hysterical exhaustion where everything becomes funny. A road sign pointing to "Hjarbaek 4km" nearly finished us off entirely.

We arrived at the holiday home in late afternoon, still giggling, and that first glimpse of the fjord through the trees stopped us both properly. The light was doing that golden thing it does in Denmark in late summer, all soft and sideways, and the water looked like someone had spilled a tray of pale metals across it - silvers, bronzes, the odd flash of copper where a fish jumped. I stood there with my car door hanging open like a proper tourist, hand luggage still dangling from my shoulder, and just gawped.

The house itself had that satisfying Scandinavian thing going on - clean lines, lots of wood, enormous windows that seemed almost rude in their insistence on showing you the view. My sister immediately claimed the bedroom with the best fjord aspect, citing some ancient sibling hierarchy I had apparently agreed to in 1987. I did not argue. I was too busy opening every cupboard in the kitchen, as one does, discovering the previous guests had left behind a nearly full jar of something called "remoulade" and a single, lonely pickled herring in a jar. We took this as a good omen. Danish holiday homes are like that - little traces of other people's summers, the odd forgotten condiment, a half-used candle that smells of something you cannot quite name.

That first evening, we did not do anything ambitious. We walked down to the little harbour area, more by accident than design, having taken a wrong turn on what we thought was the path back from the supermarket in Hjarbaek village. The harbour turned out to be one of those working places that tourists mostly miss - small boats, the smell of rope and diesel and something briny underneath, a man in overalls mending a net who nodded at us without breaking his rhythm. We sat on a bench that had "Kommunen" stamped into it and ate pastries we had bought for breakfast, watching the light change and not saying much. There is something about being slightly lost that makes you pay attention differently. You notice the way the reeds move in the shallows, the particular sound of water against hulls, how the Danish sky seems to have more layers than the English one somehow.

I thought about that drive, the farm track, the cows. The mishap had become the thing I would remember most fondly, which is so often how it goes with holidays. The planned bits blur together; the wrong turns become the stories. We found our way back eventually, following the smell of someone's barbecue through the trees, and spent the rest of the evening on the terrace with cheap white wine and that remoulade on crackers, making increasingly ambitious plans for the days ahead that we would mostly abandon in favour of more accidental wandering.