I have to admit, the journey to Marielyst rather set the tone for the whole trip. There I was, sat in the driver's seat at Gedser, absolutely certain I'd booked the ferry to Falster. Turns out I'd been staring at the timetable for the Bornholm crossing for a solid twenty minutes before a kind gentleman in a high-vis vest tapped on my window and pointed out I was in entirely the wrong queue. "First time?" he asked, which felt less like a question and more like a diagnosis. I shuffled the car round to the correct lane with what dignity I could muster, which was approximately none.

The cottage itself, when I finally reached it, proved worth every moment of confusion. A proper Danish holiday home with timber cladding and a veranda that practically demanded a cup of coffee and a lengthy sit-down. But it was the people who made those first few hours so memorable.

My immediate neighbour, a chap called Bent who must have been pushing seventy, appeared over the fence before I'd even wrestled my suitcase from the boot. He was wearing gardening trousers held up by what I can only describe as optimism and a single brace, and he launched straight into a detailed critique of my parking. "You English," he said, shaking his head with evident satisfaction, "always diagonal." I hadn't the heart to tell him I'd been aiming for straight and simply failed. He then insisted on helping me reverse properly, which involved a lot of hand gestures that bore no relation to any recognised system of communication. We got there eventually, and he accepted a tin of biscuits I'd brought as emergency rations with the solemnity of a state gift.

The woman in the little supermarket in Marielyst village, perhaps two miles down the road, was another character entirely. Birgit, according to her name badge, though she told me three times to call her Bitten. She took one look at my shopping basket - pasta, a jar of something red, and a frankly optimistic quantity of wine - and decided I needed rescuing. "That sauce," she said, with the gravity of someone delivering terrible medical news, "is for children. You are not a child." She marched me back to the shelves and selected a jar with visible chunks of something, talking all the while about her sister's English husband who couldn't pronounce "rødgrød med fløde" to save his life. "Twenty years," she said, "and still he says 'rood grood'. We love him anyway." She packed my bags with the efficiency of someone who had strong opinions about bag-packing, and sent me off with a free handful of liquorice because "you look like you need it."

That evening, attempting to work the unfamiliar barbecue in the garden, I attracted the attention of a passing cyclist who had evidently been observing my struggles from the lane. He dismounted with the air of a man who could no longer bear witness to incompetence without intervening. Jens, he said his name was, though he immediately told me everyone called him Skipper, "because of the boat, you understand, not because I am captain of anything." He had no boat, I later learned, but had once crewed on a friend's fishing vessel for a weekend in 1987 and the nickname had stuck through four decades. He took over the barbecue entirely, producing from his pannier a packet of marinated herring that he declared essential to any proper Danish grilling experience. We ate together on my veranda as the light stretched long across the garden, him doing most of the talking while I did most of the listening, which suited us both perfectly.

What struck me most, sitting there with a man I'd met twenty minutes previously, was how readily these strangers had folded me into their orbit. I'd arrived flustered and slightly ridiculous, and rather than finding that embarrassing, it had simply given everyone something to work with. There's a particular generosity in that, I think, the willingness to be amused by someone's ineptitude without making them feel small. By the time Skipper cycled off into the fading evening, leaving me with the remaining herring and strict instructions about breakfast, I felt less like a tourist and more like someone who had stumbled into a community that had decided, collectively, to adopt me.

The cottage was comfortable, the beach was lovely when I finally reached it the next morning, but it was Bent's incomprehensible hand signals and Bitten's unsolicited shopping interventions and Skipper's entirely unearned nautical nickname that stayed with me. Sometimes the best part of going somewhere new isn't where you sleep or what you see, but the peculiar collection of people who decide, for no particular reason, to make sure you don't muddle through entirely alone.