I have never been so relieved to see a row of wooden beach huts in all my life. After six hours of driving from Copenhagen, a ferry crossing where I spectacularly failed to operate the self-service coffee machine and ended up wearing most of a latte, and a final forty-minute stretch down Falster's pancake-flat roads, I finally spotted the sign for Marielyst. My SatNav had given up three roundabouts earlier, apparently offended by Danish place names, so I was navigating by instinct and a crumpled printout. The instinct, I should mention, had just directed me into someone's gravel driveway where a man in wellingtons was watching me with the patient expression of someone who has seen this before.

I wound down the window with what I hoped was an apologetic grin. "Marielyst?" I said, as if naming the place might summon it like a spirit.

He didn't answer immediately. Instead he walked over, peered into my passenger seat at the chaos of maps and snack wrappers, then said, "English?"

"Guilty."

"You took the wrong turn at the big tree." He pointed back the way I'd come. "Not that tree. The other big tree. The one that looks like a hand."

I must have looked as confused as I felt, because he actually laughed, a proper belly laugh, and then leaned on my door like we were old mates. "Follow me," he said. "I'm Henrik. I live there." He gestured to a yellow house with a garden full of what appeared to be salvaged boat parts. "I will show you the hand tree."

Henrik drove an ancient Citroen that smelled strongly of fish and something herbal I couldn't identify. At the roundabout he honked and pointed left, and sure enough there was a tree that did, if you squinted, resemble a hand reaching up from the earth. I felt absurdly pleased by this, as if I'd been let in on a local secret.

The NOVASOL property was exactly as advertised, which in my experience of holiday lettings is practically miraculous. A proper Danish summer house, all clean lines and enormous windows, with a deck that faced towards the Baltic. I was still standing there with my key in my hand, imagining myself as the sort of person who owns tasteful Scandinavian furniture, when a voice called from next door.

"You're blocking my sun!"

An elderly woman in a deckchair lowered her newspaper. She had the leathery tan of someone who has spent decades refusing to waste good weather indoors.

"Sorry," I said, stepping sideways automatically.

She cackled. "I am joking. I am Birgit. You are the English who got lost by Henrik's house." News travelled fast, apparently. "He put it on the village Facebook. We have a bet on how long you last before you try the smoked fish."

"I like smoked fish," I said, slightly defensively.

Birgit raised an eyebrow with the skill of a woman who has spent years perfecting scepticism. "Everyone says this. Then they smell the herring." She folded her newspaper with crisp efficiency. "Come. I will make coffee and tell you which beach has the best stones. The tourists all go to the wrong one. They take the smooth ones. I will show you where the interesting ones are."

I abandoned my unpacking without a second thought. Birgit's kitchen was a marvel of organised chaos, every surface covered with jars of preserved something-or-other and photographs of grandchildren in various stages of growing up. The coffee was strong enough to stand a spoon in, and the conversation wandered from her late husband's conviction that he could build a better lobster pot than anyone in Denmark to her frank assessment of my driving skills based on Henrik's description.

"You turned in his driveway with too much confidence," she said. "This is the English problem. You think you are right until proved wrong. Danes think we are wrong until proved right. It makes for better drivers, I think."

I couldn't argue. We walked to her favoured beach as the afternoon stretched into evening, and she was right about the stones. I found three with fossils in them, or things that looked like fossils, and Birgit pronounced them "maybe interesting, maybe not, but yours now" with the generosity of someone who has collected enough stones for several lifetimes.

By the time I walked back to the summer house, the light was doing that particular Baltic thing where everything seems slightly golden and unreal. Henrik waved from his garden, where he was doing something complicated with rope and a small outboard motor. I waved back, feeling already less like a tourist and more like someone who had stumbled into a place where people still had time to rescue strangers and argue about stones.

I made tea on the fancy induction hob, sat on the deck with my dubious fossils, and watched the darkness settle over Falster with the particular peace that comes from knowing you have absolutely no idea what tomorrow might bring, but that someone local will probably tell you which big tree to avoid.