I have never been so relieved to see a wooden gate in my life. After three hours of driving from Copenhagen Airport, during which I managed to get lost twice, take a wrong turn into someone's private farmyard, and spectacularly misjudge a narrow lane and scrape the hire car's wing mirror against a hedge, I finally found our Rageleje holiday home. The satnav had given up on me somewhere near Frederiksvark, and I had been navigating by instinct, which is a generous way of saying I was following a vague sense of "coastal-ish."

The key was in a lockbox, which sounds simple enough. It was not. I spent a solid ten minutes in the drizzle, fumbling with the code, convinced I had been sent the wrong numbers. My partner stood nearby with that particular expression of supportive patience that somehow makes you feel worse. When the box finally clicked open, I yanked it too hard and the key sailed clean over my shoulder into a patch of long grass. We found it eventually, damp and slightly muddy, which felt fitting somehow.

Stepping inside for the first time, I was struck by that particular hush that wooden houses seem to hold. The smell of pine and something faintly maritime, salt perhaps, or just the suggestion of it. The main living area was all exposed beams and light-coloured wood, with enormous windows looking out towards the Kattegat. I had expected to feel triumphant after our shambolic journey. Instead I felt suddenly, overwhelmingly tired, in that pleasant way you do when you finally stop moving after a long day of mild stress.

I made the classic mistake of exploring immediately rather than sitting down. The kitchen was compact but well-equipped, the sort that makes you optimistic about cooking fish you have not yet caught. The bedrooms were upstairs, tucked under sloping ceilings that I knew I would forget about and bash my head on at least once. I was correct about this, as it happened the very next morning, producing a thump that echoed through the entire house and brought my partner running, half-convinced I had fallen through something.

The real revelation came when I finally stepped onto the terrace. The garden sloped gently down towards a small path, and beyond that, the sea. Not dramatically, not craggy cliffs and crashing waves, but a calm Danish shoreline, grey-green and utterly peaceful. I stood there in my still-damp shoes, clutching a cup of tea I had made badly because I could not find the proper mugs, and felt something shift. The wing mirror, the lockbox, the farmyard detour, it all seemed briefly funny rather than frustrating.

That evening, we walked the few minutes down to Rageleje Strand proper, a proper Danish summer house beach with soft sand and those distinctive wooden bathing huts in faded colours. The light was doing that prolonged golden thing it does at this latitude, and a handful of locals were walking dogs or standing ankle-deep in the water with the resigned contentment of people who do this regularly. We ate mediocre sandwiches from a petrol station because we had not yet found the proper supermarket, and they tasted magnificent.

I think first impressions of places are rarely about the places themselves. They are about the state you arrive in, the small humiliations of travel, the accumulated decisions that seemed sensible at the time. Our Rageleje house revealed itself slowly, through the fog of my own incompetence. By the time we fell asleep that night, to the unfamiliar sound of proper quiet, I was already fond of it in a way that had nothing to do with its comfortable beds or its excellent location. It had witnessed my chaos and not seemed to mind. That, I have found, is the foundation of all worthwhile relationships.