I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I got my first proper look at a Danish road sign and nearly took us to Sweden by mistake. We'd been driving up through Jutland for the better part of three hours, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who'd briefly lived in Copenhagen a decade ago, when I confidently announced we needed to follow the blue signs for Trend. Turns out those particular blue signs were for a ferry terminal. The actual turnoff was a modest little brown sign half-hidden behind a hedge. We did a slightly undignified loop through a farmyard, waved at a very confused-looking horse, and eventually found ourselves winding down a narrow lane towards the coast.

The cottage itself, when we finally spotted it nestled among the dunes, was one of those traditional North Jutland timber-framed places with weathered cladding and a steeply pitched roof that looked like it had been keeping an eye on the Limfjord since before anyone thought to write things down. I was still muttering about road signage as I hauled our bags out of the boot, which is how I managed to drop the entire week's worth of carefully packed groceries onto the gravel drive. Six eggs survived out of twelve. The chorizo rolled under the car. I stood there in the late afternoon light, holding a leaking bag of flour and wondering if Danish supermarkets stayed open past six.

They do not, as it happens, not in these parts. Not on a Tuesday.

This revelation led to our first proper meal at the cottage being something of a salvage operation. We had four eggs, the chorizo I'd fished out from beneath the exhaust pipe, a slightly dented tin of chickpeas, and a bag of flour that was now more of a paste. My partner, who fancies himself something of a cook, declared he would make flatbreads. I opened the wine. The flatbreads emerged from the ancient cast-iron pan as something between crackers and roofing tiles, but we crumbled them over a makeshift chickpea and chorizo stew and ate sitting at the little wooden table by the window, watching the fjord turn silver in the fading light. It was, against all odds, absolutely delicious. There's something about being slightly desperate and very hungry that improves a meal beyond all reason.

The next morning, properly chastened, we set out to find actual food. The local village, which consists of perhaps two dozen houses and a harbour where small boats bobbed against the tide, had a tiny general store that sold coffee, tinned fish, and not much else. The woman behind the counter directed us, with the patient air of someone who'd done this many times before, to the market at Nykobing Mors, a short drive across the bridge. We spent a happy hour there, loading up on smoked mackerel, dense rye bread, local cheese that tasted of the grass the cows had eaten, and vegetables that still had actual soil on them. I bought a pot of honey from a man who'd kept bees for forty years and talked about them as though they were slightly wayward relatives.

That evening we did things properly. I fried the mackerel simply, with butter and nothing else, while my partner tackled the rye bread with more respect than he'd shown any loaf in his life. We ate outside on the little terrace as the light stretched across the water, and I felt that particular contentment that comes from having fed yourself well in a beautiful place after a day of minor calamities.

The pub situation in these parts is not what you'd call lively. The nearest proper one was a fifteen-minute drive, a low-beamed place in a village whose name I never learned to pronounce correctly. The landlord pulled us pints of a local ale that tasted faintly of the sea, and we ate pickled herring with raw onion and boiled potatoes, which my partner had insisted he wouldn't enjoy and then finished entirely. An elderly man at the bar told us, in excellent English, about fishing in the fjord fifty years ago, when the cod were so thick you could practically walk across their backs. I believed him, mostly because he said it with the quiet certainty of someone who'd seen things change and made his peace with it.

We cooked every evening after that, growing bolder with our purchases from various farm shops and the occasional market. I attempted a traditional Danish pork roast one night, which took three hours longer than the recipe suggested and emerged with crackling like bulletproof glass. We hacked at it with determination and drank too much of the local schnapps someone had pressed upon us. My partner made fish soup with plaice from the harbour, which was silky and perfect and made me slightly resentful given his previous flatbread catastrophe.

On our final morning, I walked down to the water alone, early, before anyone else was about. The tide was going out, leaving patterns in the sand that looked almost deliberate. I thought about how I'd arrived annoyed and flour-covered and slightly lost, and how a week of good meals and quiet moments had sorted something in me that I hadn't known needed sorting. The cottage stood behind me, smoke already curling from the chimney where my partner was presumably burning the breakfast. I went back to help, or at least to open more wine and call it brunch. Some traditions, once established, are worth keeping.