I have never been particularly good with ferries, and my crossing from Puttgarden to Rodby only confirmed this when I spent twenty minutes searching for my car on the vehicle deck, convinced someone had stolen it, before realising I had simply forgotten which colour I'd hired. The drive up through Zealand and across the Great Belt Bridge should have been straightforward, but I managed to miss the exit for Funen twice, once because I was distracted by a wind turbine that looked a bit like a giant whisk, and once because my sat-nav decided to have a small existential crisis and suggest I drive into the sea.

By the time I reached Bro Strand, somewhere south of Middelfart, I was already fraying at the edges. The property sat tucked among pine trees near the beach, a traditional Danish summer house with weathered wood and that particular Scandinavian look of having its life together far better than I did. I fumbled with the key box, dropped the code sheet into a patch of wet leaves, and spent several minutes performing what I can only describe as an interpretive dance of frustration before finally getting inside.

The first thing that struck me was the smell. Not the musty damp I'd half-expected from a coastal property, but something clean and woody, like someone had been burning decent candles in my absence. The second thing was the light. Great sliding doors opened onto a deck that seemed to merge straight into the pines, and beyond them, I could just catch glimpses of the Little Belt shimmering in the late afternoon. I stood there with my suitcase still in the car and my coat half-off, suddenly aware that I had been holding my shoulders somewhere up near my ears for the past four hours.

My small mishap came when I attempted what I grandly termed "unpacking." I had brought, in my wisdom, a bottle of English gin as a housewarming gift to myself, and in my eagerness to locate a glass, I managed to pull open what I thought was a kitchen cupboard only to discover it was a cleverly disguised boiler housing. The door came off in my hand with a plastic clatter that seemed to echo through the entire house and probably several neighbouring ones too. I stood there, holding a white panel and a slightly bent hinge, wondering if this was the moment to practice my extremely limited Danish vocabulary. "Undskyld" seemed insufficient. "Jeg er en idiot" felt more accurate.

I wedged the door back into place with the strategic optimism of a man who has never successfully fixed anything in his life, and retreated to the deck with my gin and a mug, having failed to locate proper glassware in my shame. The pines moved slightly in the breeze. Somewhere, a bird made a noise that sounded approving, or possibly mocking. I chose to interpret it as approving.

What struck me then, sitting on slightly damp wood with my knees pulled up and my phone deliberately left inside, was how quickly the particular chaos of arrival gives way to something else. The wrong turns and the ferry panic and the cupboard demolition, they all seemed to belong to a different, more anxious version of myself. The house had that quality good holiday places have, of seeming to wait patiently for you to catch up with where you actually are.

I watched the light change over the water and thought about how I would need to confess the cupboard to the property manager eventually, but probably not tonight. Tonight I would walk down to that beach, still in my socks because I had forgotten to pack proper shoes in my accessible bag, and let the cold Danish sand remind me that I had, despite everything, arrived exactly where I was supposed to be.