I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I confidently loaded our entire life into the car, only to realise at the Dartford Crossing that I'd left my wallet on the kitchen table. Cue a frantic phone call to my mother-in-law, a very patient courier service, and a three-hour delay that had the children asking if Denmark was actually in Kent. By the time we reached the Eurotunnel, my husband was doing that tight-lipped smile he reserves for my finest moments.

The crossing itself was mercifully dull, which after the morning's performance felt like a small victory. We rolled off at Calais and pointed the car north, the kids eventually dozing off somewhere near Brussels while I navigated and my husband drove with the determined focus of a man who had sworn never to comment on the wallet incident.

We arrived at Helsingor Strand in the late afternoon, that golden hour when everything looks either magical or utterly exhausted depending on your perspective. The place is proper North Zealand territory, all coastal pines and that particular Scandinavian light that makes you feel like you're inside a particularly tasteful furniture catalogue. The cottage complex sits right near the shore, little wooden houses clustered together like they're having a quiet chat about the weather.

Our particular cottage looked exactly as the photos had promised, which is rarer than you'd think in holiday lettings. Red wood, white trim, the whole hygge package. I was halfway up the path with the first armful of bags when I discovered the key safe code I'd carefully photographed was, in fact, the code for the bin store at my mother-in-law's flat. The same mother-in-law who had rescued my wallet. The universe has a sense of humour, apparently.

My husband found this significantly less amusing than I eventually managed to. Twenty minutes of increasingly creative language and a slightly embarrassing call to the letting agency later, we were in. The door opened directly into a living area that smelled of pine and recent cleaning, all light wood floors and those enormous Danish windows that make British housing feel like something from the Victorian era. The children shot past me to investigate bunk beds, and I stood there with my useless phone and my remaining shred of dignity, watching the late sun come through the trees.

The kitchen was one of those open-plan affairs that immediately made me want to cook something complicated involving fish, despite the fact that my culinary range normally extends to spag bol and emergency toast. There was a proper coffee machine too, the kind with more buttons than my car dashboard. I made a mental note to figure it out before my husband attempted it and inevitably broke something.

By the time we'd unloaded the car and the children had established a complex territorial dispute over the top bunk, evening was settling in properly. We walked the fifty metres or so down to the shoreline, the kids racing ahead while my husband and I trailed behind with that particular parental gait that comes from sitting in a car for twelve hours. The beach was pebbly, proper Baltic coast stuff, and the water had that grey-green quality that looks freezing and absolutely is.

The children didn't care, of course. They were already throwing stones with the chaotic enthusiasm that makes beach visits simultaneously wonderful and slightly terrifying. My husband and I stood there watching them, and I had one of those moments that hit you sometimes on holiday - the realisation that this was it, this was the memory we'd keep, the ordinary magic of somewhere new with the people we chose.

Then my youngest announced he needed a poo and the moment passed, as these moments do. We walked back to the cottage with that particular parental urgency, past the other little wooden houses with their candles in windows and their bicycles leaning against walls. Someone was grilling something that smelled incredible. A cat watched us from a windowsill with the superior expression of a creature that has never forgotten a key safe code in its life.

That first evening, we ate the emergency pasta I'd packed because I am my mother's daughter and never travel without dried carbohydrates. The children fell asleep in their clothes, faces still pink from the wind. My husband and I sat with wine in the little garden area, listening to the distant sound of the sea and someone else's barbecue party, and I thought about how we'd remember this trip - not the smooth bits, but the chaotic, human, slightly ridiculous arrival that got us here.

The coffee machine defeated me completely the next morning, but that's another story entirely.