I have never been so relieved to see a wooden shed in my life. Three hours after leaving Copenhagen, two wrong turns past fields that all looked identical, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted "Kongsnas" was pronounced with a hard G, we finally crunched up the gravel drive to what the booking photos had promised was a "charming traditional Danish cottage." What we found was a red wooden house that looked like it had been built by someone who really, really trusted right angles.

The mishap, because there is always a mishap, happened approximately forty seconds after I turned off the engine. I flung open the car door with the triumphant energy of a man who has survived Danish motorway services, and promptly stepped straight into a flowerbed. Not just any flowerbed. The flowerbed. The one with the little wooden sign that said, in very neat lettering, "Velkommen." I had been welcomed to Denmark by crushing someone's carefully arranged tulips. My wife laughed so hard she dropped the house keys in the gravel. We found them twenty minutes later, by which point the children had already claimed bedrooms and established a complex territorial dispute over who got the top bunk.

Kongsnas sits on Falster's southern coast, and the first thing that strikes you is the quiet. Not the ominous quiet of a horror film, but the proper, restful quiet of a place where the most demanding schedule is tide-dependent. The cottage itself is painted that particular Scandinavian red that makes everything else look slightly apologetic for not being Scandinavian red. White trim. Proper thatched roof, which I immediately began worrying about in a way that suggested I had somehow become my own father.

Inside smells of pine and something else I could not place. "Old holidays," my wife said, which sounds pretentious but was exactly right. The kitchen had one of those cookers with knobs that require a degree in engineering, and a fridge that hummed with the determination of a small aircraft. The children discovered the garden, which sloped down toward proper Danish farmland, and vanished into it with the kind of feral enthusiasm that only children who have been in a car for three hours can muster.

I made tea with Danish teabags that tasted faintly of liquorice, which I pretended to enjoy because I am British and that is what we do. Sat at the wooden table by the window, watching my daughter attempt to communicate with a bumblebee, I felt something shift. The sat nav argument, the tulip massacre, the keys in the gravel - it all compressed into that particular holiday feeling where nothing is going exactly right and somehow that is precisely the point.

The beach is a short walk, though "short" depends heavily on how many times your children stop to examine rocks. We went down that first evening, just to see. The Baltic stretched out in that grey-blue way it has, and a man was walking his dog in the water with the resigned expression of someone who does this daily. My son, who had refused to wear his coat despite vigorous protest, announced he was freezing and demanded to be carried back. I carried him, my back complaining, my shoes full of sand, and I was absolutely, completely happy about it.

That first night we cooked badly, using ingredients we had bought from a supermarket where we could not read half the labels. The cooker knobs defeated me. We ate slightly burnt something with slightly raw something else, and the children declared it the best meal they had ever had. The fridge hummed its approval. Outside, Falster did what Falster does best - nothing much at all, and everything that matters.