I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I confidently loaded our entire family's luggage into the hire car at Billund Airport, only to discover two hours later that I'd left my own rucksack on the trolley in the car park. My wife's face as I patted my pockets for the third time and mumbled something about "travelling light" will stay with me forever. Still, we were bound for Spodsbjerg on Langeland, and I was determined that a missing bag of pants and chargers would not derail our family break.

The drive across Funen and onto Langeland itself is properly lovely once you get past the bridge. The landscape flattens out into these rolling fields that seem to stretch forever, dotted with red-roofed farmhouses and the odd windmill doing its lazy turning. The children had fallen into that peculiar road-trip coma where they stare at tablets but insist they are not tired, while my wife and I took turns guessing what Danish road signs might mean. We were wrong about nearly all of them.

Finding the property was straightforward enough, though I did manage to overshoot the turning twice, which I blamed on "confusing Scandinavian numbering" rather than my own refusal to use the sat nav properly. The lane down to Spodsbjerg is narrow and crunchy with gravel, winding between hedgerows until suddenly there it is: a proper white Danish cottage with that distinctive black timber framing, sitting in its own generous garden with views out towards the water.

My first impression, stepping out of the car and stretching legs that had gone numb somewhere near Svendborg, was of absolute quiet. Not the uncomfortable silence of somewhere deserted, but the restful hush of a place that has never known much traffic or hurry. A few birds calling. The distant sound of a boat motor somewhere on the strait. My daughter immediately announced she needed the toilet, which rather broke the poetic moment, but such is family life.

The key was in the lockbox as promised, and I performed the little ritual of fumbling with the code while the children bounced around me asking if there was Wi-Fi and whether the television had Netflix. The door opened onto a hallway that smelled of wood polish and that particular clean, slightly salty scent you get in coastal Danish properties. I will admit to a small surge of relief; holiday rentals can be so hit and miss, but this felt immediately like somewhere people actually care for.

The living room is the heart of the place, with its wood-burning stove and windows looking out towards the garden and the water beyond. The children thundered upstairs to claim bedrooms, and I heard a brief squabble about who got the room with the better view, quickly resolved by my wife's intervention. I stood in the kitchen, which is compact but sensibly arranged, and made the ceremonial first cup of tea with the kettle provided, using the teabags I'd fortunately packed in my coat pocket rather than my abandoned rucksack.

That first evening, we did not venture far. We unpacked what we had, which for me meant borrowing a toothbrush from my wife and accepting that I would be wearing the same jeans for longer than strictly ideal. We walked down to the little rocky shore as the light faded, the children throwing stones into the calm water with that particular intensity children bring to such activities. My wife found a spot to sit on a weathered wooden groyne, and I stood beside her, feeling the day of travel settling into my shoulders, watching the sky turn that soft pink-grey that northern evenings do so well.

I thought about how we had rushed to get here, the usual pre-holiday panic of work handovers and packing and checking passports seventeen times. And now here we were, in this unhurried corner of Denmark, with nothing demanded of us except to be present and perhaps remember to buy me some clean clothes in the morning. There is something humbling about arriving somewhere new, something that strips away the illusion that you are in control of very much at all. The forgotten bag was annoying, certainly, but also weirdly freeing. I was here, imperfectly prepared, and the world had not ended.

We walked back up to the cottage as the first stars appeared, the children already asking about breakfast and whether we might light the wood stove. I said yes to both, because that is what holidays are for, and because I suspected the morning would bring its own small adventures, and I wanted to meet them well-rested and perhaps slightly less incompetent than I had been so far.