We had been on the road for what felt like fourteen hours but was probably closer to four when I realised, with the sort of sinking feeling that only comes from absolute certainty, that I had left the printed directions on the kitchen table in Essex. My partner Dave, who had been navigating via a mixture of instinct and stubbornness since we left the ferry at Rostock, shot me a look that managed to convey both profound disappointment and a grudging acceptance that this was entirely on brand for me.

The Danish countryside is lovely in late afternoon light, I can confirm, particularly when you are seeing rather more of it than intended. We circled through Nykobing Falster twice, which is a perfectly pleasant town but not one I had hoped to become intimately familiar with from every conceivable angle. Dave finally swallowed his pride and asked for directions at a petrol station, where a very patient teenager explained in flawless English that we had essentially driven past our turning three times already.

Marielyst itself, when we finally found it, announced itself with pine trees and a sudden glimpse of the Baltic that made me forget entirely about my navigational incompetence. The holiday home sat tucked along one of the quieter lanes, a proper wooden Danish place with that distinctive pitched roof and decking that screamed "we are about to live outdoors for a week." I had chosen it specifically for the sauna and the wood-burning stove, two things I associate with wholesome Scandinavian living and which I had been boring Dave about since March.

The key was in the lockbox as promised, though extracting it required me to perform what Dave later described as "a sort of aggressive interpretive dance" while I juggled the code, my phone torch, and a wasp that had taken a sudden interest in my left ear. The door swung open to that particular smell of pine and cleaning products that I am now convinced all Danish holiday homes possess, some kind of national olfactory standard.

I will not say the place was smaller than the photos suggested, because that is a tedious holiday complaint and I am above such things. I will merely note that Dave, who is six foot two and built like a man who enjoys his pastries, immediately knocked his head on a light fitting and spent the first five minutes muttering darkly about building regulations. The living area was open-plan in that efficient Nordic way, all pale wood and clever storage, with enormous windows that framed the greenery outside like a particularly smug painting.

I made straight for the kitchen, because my theory is that you can tell everything about a holiday let from its knives and its mugs. The knives were sharp, which I appreciated. The mugs were the chunky white sort that make even instant coffee feel vaguely artisanal. I put the kettle on and promptly discovered that Danish kettles operate on some principle of physics I do not understand, because it took approximately six minutes to boil and made a noise like a small aircraft preparing for takeoff.

Dave had wandered outside to inspect the decking and reported back that the outdoor furniture was "actually decent" and that he had seen a hare in the garden, which he described with the wonder of a man who grew up in Croydon. I joined him with two mugs of tea that I had made with the wrong sort of milk from the emergency supplies we had brought, and we stood there in the fading light, slightly hysterical from the drive, watching the trees move in that particular Baltic way they have.

The sauna, I should mention, required me to read instructions in three languages before I understood that the stones needed actual water poured on them, not just hope and good intentions. Dave found this hilarious and filmed my first attempt, which produced more steam than I expected and left me looking, in his words, "like a man who has just seen his own mortality." I have not yet forgiven him, though I did feel genuinely excellent afterwards, loose-limbed and pink and ready to face whatever else this corner of Falster might throw at us.

By the time we unpacked the essentials and located the proper bed linen, which had been cunningly hidden in a storage bench I had initially mistaken for decorative, it was properly dark. The wood-burning stove took three attempts to light because I had forgotten that Scandinavian stoves are not the theatrical affairs of British country pubs but serious pieces of engineering that demand respect and proper kindling. Dave read the instructions aloud in a mocking tone that I chose to ignore because I was concentrating on not setting fire to my own sleeve.

We ate bread and cheese for dinner because the supermarkets had closed and neither of us had the energy for the twenty-minute drive back to civilisation. It was, honestly, one of the better meals I have had, eaten at the little wooden table with the stove finally crackling and the silence of the pines pressing against the windows. Dave fell asleep in his chair at half past nine, mouth slightly open, looking about twelve years old.

I sat up a while longer, feeling smug about the sauna and the knives and the hare in the garden, already editing the story of our arrival into something I could tell at dinner parties. The truth is that I am not a natural traveller, not one of those effortless people who arrive places looking composed and prepared. I forget directions and misjudge kettles and perform interpretive dances with wasps. But there is something about the particular quiet of a Danish holiday home at night, the way the light falls through those enormous windows, that makes my particular brand of chaos feel manageable, even charming.

I went to bed resolving to do better tomorrow, to be the sort of person who reads instructions before attempting things and who remembers where she put the car keys. I woke at three in the morning to find Dave standing in the kitchen in his pants, trying to remember which tap produced drinking water, and felt an unexpected rush of affection for both him and this ridiculous, lovely, slightly too compact house in the pines.