I have never been so relieved to see a wooden beach hut in my life, and that includes the time I got caught in a hailstorm on Brighton seafront. The drive from Odense had been straightforward enough, right up until I followed my sat nav down what I can only describe as a farm track masquerading as a road, convinced I was being led to some secret Danish smuggling operation rather than a holiday let.

The mishap came at a T-junction that definitely was not on any map I possessed. I turned left. I should have turned right. Twenty minutes later I found myself in someone's courtyard, surrounded by curious sheep and one extremely unimpressed border collie who stared at me with the kind of judgement I usually reserve for people who put milk in first. Reversing out in a hire Peugeot with slightly too much enthusiasm, I clipped a wooden post and sent a bucket flying. The farmer appeared from his barn, and I prepared myself for an international incident.

He turned out to be Henrik, a man whose English was roughly equal to my Danish, which is to say we had about twelve words between us. He looked at the bucket, looked at me, looked at the sheep who had gathered like an audience at a particularly disappointing pantomime, and burst out laughing. Proper wheezing laughter, the kind that makes you join in even when you are the obvious fool. He waved off my apologies, pointed back the way I had come with elaborate hand gestures, and pressed two apples into my hands from his pocket. I ate them later. They were the best apples I have ever tasted, which I suspect had something to do with sheer relief.

When I finally found Tarup Strand, it was the woman in the neighbouring hut who saved me from further humiliation. Birgitte was in her sixties, permanently equipped with a thermos and a folding chair, and she watched my second attempt at reversing with the patient expression of someone who had seen this many times before. She did not introduce herself so much as simply begin talking, assuming correctly that I was too polite and too confused to walk away.

"You came the long way," she said, which I gathered was Danish for "you are an idiot but I shall not say so directly." She explained that she had been coming to this stretch of coast since childhood, that her grandmother had known the original owners of these huts, that the water was too cold for swimming before July and that only mad English people attempted it regardless. I liked her immediately.

Over the next three days, Birgitte adopted me with the efficiency of a project manager. She introduced me to Erik, a retired fisherman who cleaned his boat every morning with ceremonial precision and complained about mackerel prices to anyone within earshot. He spoke almost entirely in proverbs that Birgitte would then translate, though I suspected she was improving roughly half of them for comic effect. "The herring does not complain about the net," Erik announced one morning, which Birgitte rendered as "stop moaning about your sunburn." I had not been moaning. Much.

There was also young Rasmus, who delivered bread to the huts on a bicycle that looked older than he was, and who practiced his English by describing American films he had only half understood. He once spent twenty minutes explaining the plot of what I eventually realised was The Godfather, though his version involved significantly more motorcycles and a happy ending I do not recall from the original.

What struck me, sitting outside that modest hut with my instant coffee and Birgitte's borrowed blanket, was how quickly these strangers had folded me into their rhythm. I had arrived flustered and ridiculous, a foreigner in a hire car with apple juice on my trousers, and somehow I was now part of a morning routine that involved discussing wind direction with a man who had never learned my surname.

I think sometimes we travel expecting landscapes to transform us, and forget that people do most of the work. Funen did not change my life, but Henrik's apples, Birgitte's translations, Erik's herring philosophy, they accumulated into something I had not expected: the sense of having been briefly, genuinely, somewhere. Not just geographically present, but accounted for, noticed, laughed at and then laughed with.

On my last morning, Birgitte produced an extra cup of coffee without comment. Erik waved from his boat. Rasmus delivered a pastry he said was "on mistake" from his route, though the wink suggested otherwise. I left the same way I should have arrived, turning right at that T-junction, and I did not get lost once.