I should have known the holiday proper started before we even reached Sondbjerg Strand, when my phone decided that Limfjorden was more of a theoretical concept than an actual place. I'd downloaded the directions, smugly, the night before. "I've got this," I'd told my partner, waving my mobile about like a compass. Three hours into our drive from the ferry, we found ourselves down a farm track staring at a very patient-looking herd of Danish Red cattle who, I swear, were judging my navigation skills.

The sat nav had quietly given up somewhere near Veno, leaving us to discover that Limfjorden's beauty is matched only by its ability to hide its best bits from anyone in a right-hand-drive car. We turned down lanes that became tracks, tracks that became gravel, and gravel that became what I can only describe as a philosophical question about what constitutes a road. Somewhere past Hvalpsund, we took a wrong turn that felt catastrophic at the time but proved to be the making of the entire trip.

There, wedged between two hedgerows and apparently invisible to cartography, sat a tiny wooden jetty with a single bench. No sign, no car park, no ice cream van playing a sinister tune. Just water so still it looked like someone had forgotten to animate it, and the distant hum of what I later learned was a mussel farm's morning routine. We sat there for twenty minutes, eating slightly squashed supermarket pastries and watching a heron conduct its own private business. I'd planned nothing for this moment, which was precisely why it worked.

The actual arrival at Sondbjerg Strand happened by accident too, if I'm honest. We'd been aiming for the main approach, the proper one with the sign, but another wrong turn - this time down a lane thick with cow parsley - deposited us at the back of the property near the beach access path. I was ready to reverse, red-faced, but my partner was already out of the car, staring at the fjord. "Come and look at this," she said, in that tone that brooks no argument.

The beach there isn't sandy in the postcard sense. It's pebbles graduating to mudflats, the kind that suck at your boots and make you walk with the exaggerated care of someone crossing a room full of Lego. But the light on that first evening, after all our glorious getting lost, turned everything silvery and strange. We stood there like the tourists we absolutely were, watching a local in wellies dig for lugworms with the practised rhythm of someone who'd done this ten thousand times before. He nodded at us. We nodded back. Communication perfected.

The cottage itself, when we finally found the proper entrance, had that particular Scandinavian talent for making simplicity feel luxurious. But I won't pretend I cared much about the interior that first night. We kept wandering back down that accidental path to the water, half-convinced we'd discovered something secret, though of course locals had been walking it since before my great-grandparents were born. That's the gentle humiliation of travel, isn't it? Arriving somewhere convinced you've found the undiscovered, then realising you're just the latest in a long line of people who thought exactly the same thing, and were equally wrong, and equally happy about it.

I still don't know the name of that jetty. I've tried to find it since on maps, failed, and decided some things are better kept slightly lost.