I had convinced myself that driving onto the ferry at Puttgarden would be the stressful bit, and that everything afterwards would unfold in a calm, Scandinavian sort of way. Reader, I was wrong.

The crossing itself was fine - bit choppy, overpriced hot dog, standard stuff - but the real comedy began about twenty minutes after we rolled off in Rodby and pointed the car towards Funen. My partner had been navigating, or rather, "navigating," which in her case means holding the phone at an angle that makes the map entirely invisible to the driver and occasionally announcing turns approximately four seconds after we have passed them. We missed the exit for the E20 not once but twice, looping through some very flat farmland while she insisted the GPS was "having a moment." I suggested the GPS might not be the only one.

By the time we reached Bojden, I had developed that particular tension headache that sits directly behind the eyes and makes you overly philosophical about motorways. The village itself appeared suddenly after a stretch of coastal road - a handful of houses, a harbour that looked genuinely picturesque even through my irritation, and a general atmosphere of having stumbled into somewhere that had not been expecting visitors on a Tuesday afternoon in April.

The property was one of those traditional Danish holiday homes, painted that deep burgundy-red with white trim that makes everything look slightly like a children's illustration. Very hygge, very tasteful. I was prepared to be charmed. What I was not prepared for was the key safe.

We had been sent a code, obviously. I had written it in my phone, in a note, and also - because I am the sort of person who does this - on a scrap of paper in my wallet. The scrap of paper had apparently been sacrificed to purchase the overpriced ferry hot dog. The note on my phone had auto-corrected the final digit from a 7 to a question mark, which I only discovered after ten minutes of increasingly frantic button-pressing while my partner made helpful observations from a slight distance.

"Maybe try your birthday," she offered.

"My birthday is not four digits."

"Year of birth then?"

"That would make me ninety-two."

The key safe, I should mention, was mounted on a wooden post at precisely the height that required me to crouch slightly, which added a physical indignity to the psychological one. A woman walked past with a dog and smiled in that particularly Danish way that manages to be friendly without actually promising anything. I smiled back with what I hoped was relaxed good humour rather than the desperation I was actually feeling.

We got in eventually, obviously, or I would not be writing this. The code was something else entirely, buried in a confirmation email I had failed to scroll down far enough to read. The door opened onto a smell of pine and something faintly maritime, and I stood there in the hallway with my ridiculous crouch-induced back twinge and felt something shift.

The place was simple in the best way - wooden floors, a kitchen that looked like someone actually cooked in it rather than just photographed it, windows that framed the harbour in a manner that suggested the architect had known exactly what they were doing. My partner had already found the coffee maker and was making the small sounds of satisfaction that indicate she has forgiven the navigation debacle.

I unpacked badly, as I always do, creating small piles of clothing in corners rather than using the perfectly adequate wardrobe. We opened a window and the sound of the harbour came in - not dramatic, not picturesque in any staged sense, just the ordinary movement of water against boats and the occasional call between people who knew each other properly.

That first evening we walked down to the water's edge without any particular purpose. The light was doing that long, slow fade that northern evenings do so well, and someone was grilling fish somewhere nearby in a way that made our ferry hot dog seem increasingly like a bad decision. I thought about how I had arrived tense and ridiculous, crouched at a key safe like a man trying to crack a safe in a very low-budget heist film, and how quickly that version of myself had become impossible to take seriously.

We bought bread from a small shop the next morning, and I will tell you about the rest of the week another time, but what stays with me is that first hour - the chaos of arrival, the small humiliations of travel, and then the particular quiet of finding yourself somewhere that asks nothing of you except that you slow down enough to notice it.