I have never been so relieved to see a wooden A-frame in my entire life. Three hours after leaving Aalborg Airport, having confidently ignored the sat nav in favour of what I called "a more scenic route," we found ourselves down a farm track staring at a very closed gate and a very open field of sheep who seemed personally offended by our presence. My partner, who had been suggesting we turn back since the second wrong turn, adopted that particular expression of British restraint that says "I will not say I told you so, but I am definitely thinking it loudly."

The actual road to Trend, when we finally located it, revealed itself through a corridor of birch trees that opened suddenly onto Limfjorden proper. The water lay flat and silver-grey, dotted with the little fishing boats that make this part of Jutland feel properly lived-in rather than merely picturesque. Our cottage sat perhaps fifty metres from the shore, clad in that distinctive dark timber that Danish holiday homes wear so well, with a deck that looked out towards the fjord and a chimney promising the wood burner I had specifically booked for.

The key was where they said it would be, which sounds like a small thing but represents a significant victory in my holiday history. I once spent forty minutes searching for a keysafe in Cornwall that turned out to be a bird box. The door opened with that satisfying thunk of solid Scandinavian engineering, and we stepped into warmth and the immediate smell of pine. The children, who had been maintaining a state of low-level bickering since the sheep incident, fell silent in that way they do when confronted with an unfamiliar space that might contain hidden corners or, more importantly, a television.

I will confess that my first act was to walk straight through the living area and open the sliding doors onto that deck, needing to confirm that the view matched the photographs. It did, mostly, though the photographs had not captured the pair of swans making their stately progress along the shoreline, nor the particular quality of late afternoon light that turns the fjord water something approaching pewter. My daughter appeared beside me, still in her coat, and observed that it smelled "like outside but better," which I consider genuinely profound for a nine-year-old.

The kitchen revealed itself to be one of those compact Danish arrangements where everything has been considered with slightly unnerving efficiency. I opened three consecutive drawers finding exactly the utensil I needed each time, which created an unfamiliar sensation of competence that I knew would not last. My attempt to operate the induction hob later that evening would restore proper balance to the universe, but for those first ten minutes I felt like someone who genuinely had their life together.

The wood burner, naturally, became my immediate project. There is something about being the designated fire-builder in a family that brings out both my most capable and most absurd self. I arranged kindling with architectural precision, struck a match with theatrical confidence, and produced approximately forty seconds of promising crackle followed by sullen smoke and eventual failure. My partner, who had been reading on the sofa with ostentatious patience, eventually wandered over and opened the air vent I had failed to locate, transforming my smouldering embarrassment into actual flames with a single twist. I thanked her with the particular grace that comes from having one's incompetence publicly demonstrated.

By the time darkness settled properly over the fjord, we had established our positions. The children had claimed the loft bedroom with its sloping ceilings and inevitable head-bumping potential. I had opened a bottle of the supermarket wine purchased in Thisted, which tasted of reasonable decisions and travel fatigue. Through the windows, the water had become simply absence, a darkness against which the occasional running light of a distant vessel passed.

The sheep were forgiven, mostly. The sat nav sat unconsulted on the kitchen counter, already gathering the particular dust of holiday homes. Tomorrow would bring the proper exploration, the walking boots and the packed lunches and the inevitable discovery that we had forgotten something crucial but not yet identifiable. For now, there was the fire, and the wine, and the particular peace of having arrived somewhere that asked nothing of you but to be present in it.