I have never been so grateful for a thermos of tea in my entire life. There we were, my partner and I, trundling up the E47 from Copenhagen in a hire car the size of a postage stamp, convinced we had packed everything for our autumn week at Hornbaek Strand. We had woollies, wellies, waterproofs, and enough Danish pastries from a bakery in Hellerup to feed a small army. What we did not have, as I discovered with a sinking heart halfway up the coast, was the actual key collection details. I had screenshotted them. I had definitely screenshotted them. But my phone, in that smug way phones have, had chosen that morning to perform a software update and now sat there like a brick, refusing to tell me anything useful whatsoever.

Autumn in North Zealand does not wait for you to sort your life out. The wind was already picking up as we pulled into a petrol station somewhere near Fredensborg, me frantically jabbing at a screen that had less life in it than a week-old kringle. My partner, who has the patience of a saint and the navigation skills of a homing pigeon, eventually managed to get us back on track using nothing but a battered road atlas left in the glove compartment from 2014. We found the key office, collected our fob, and finally rolled up to Hornbaek Strand as the afternoon light was doing that extraordinary golden thing it does in late October, low and slanted and somehow apologetic for the chill in the air.

The first thing that struck me was the smell. Not the brine and seaweed I had expected, though that came later, but woodsmoke. Someone, somewhere along the row of cabins, had got their fire going already, and the scent hung in the damp air like a promise. The place itself sat tucked among birch trees that had turned the most ridiculous shade of yellow, the kind of yellow that makes you slightly angry because no photograph will ever do it justice. Leaves plastered themselves to the windscreen before we had even turned off the engine.

Our cabin looked out towards the Kattegat, though "looked out" is doing some heavy lifting when the daylight was fading fast and the sea had turned the colour of old slate. What I could see, however, was enough. The beach stretched away in both directions, completely empty, the sand darkened by recent rain and the receding tide leaving these extraordinary patterns, like someone had taken a giant comb to it. I stood there on the little wooden deck with my still-warm tea, watching my breath cloud in front of me, and felt something shift. The summer crowds were long gone. The ice cream kiosks were shuttered. Even the famous Hornbaek Harbour, usually bustling with boats and people doing boat-adjacent things, had taken on that particular off-season hush that makes you whisper without quite knowing why.

The mishap with the phone had rattled me more than I wanted to admit. I am usually the organised one, the spreadsheet maker, the person who prints boarding passes just in case. Standing there in the gathering dark, listening to the wind move through those birch trees and the distant sound of waves, I realised how much I had been relying on the illusion of control. Autumn strips things back. The trees know it, dropping their leaves with what looks like abandon but is really just sensible preparation. The tourists know it, having fled to warmer prospects. Even the light knows it, refusing to stay long enough for anyone to get too comfortable.

We got that fire going eventually, after some comedy involving damp kindling and my partner's stubborn refusal to read instructions. The cabin warmed slowly, reluctantly, the way these places do when the season has turned. I found myself glad of the darkness outside, glad of the cold that made the warmth inside feel earned rather than given. We ate our slightly squashed pastries for supper because we could not be bothered to find the supermarket, and they tasted of nothing so much as triumph.

That first evening set the tone for everything that followed. The season had made the decisions for us, really. No swimming, obviously, unless you count that one brisk walk where a wave caught me unawares and I hopped about swearing while my partner laughed into their scarf. No late nights sitting on the deck with a glass of wine, unless you wanted to lose a finger to frostbite. Instead, there were long mornings watching the mist roll in from the sea, turning the world soft and uncertain. There were afternoons walking the coastal path towards Saunte, the heather and gorse giving way to pine woods that smelled of resin and rain. There were evenings of extraordinary, almost theatrical sunsets, the kind that seem to last for hours because the sun has so little enthusiasm for actually departing.

I kept thinking about that phone, or rather about the version of myself who had needed it so desperately. She felt very far away by the end of the week, replaced by someone who could stand on a beach in a force six wind and genuinely not mind that her hair had become a bird's nest. The season had forced a slowness upon us that I had not known I needed. There was nowhere to rush to, nothing to queue for, no performance of holiday-making to keep up. Just the sea, doing what it has done for millennia, and the trees, getting on with the serious business of letting go.

We left on a morning when the first proper frost had come, the deck boards silvered and treacherous underfoot. I took one last look at that view, the grey water and the pale sky and the dark line of Sweden just visible on the horizon, and I felt something complicated settle in my chest. Gratitude, I suppose, mixed with the melancholy that autumn seems to specialise in. The key went back in its dropbox. The little car coughed its way back to Copenhagen. And I sat in the passenger seat, phone safely charged but largely ignored, watching the North Zealand landscape roll past in all its bare, honest beauty, already plotting when we might return. Though perhaps, I thought, with a proper map next time. And the key details written down on actual paper, like the ancients used to do.