I have never been brilliant with directions, so the fact I made it to Vejby Strand at all felt like something of a personal triumph. The train from Copenhagen to Helsingor was straightforward enough, but then I decided to hire a bicycle for the last stretch. "It's only seven kilometres," I told myself, waving cheerily at the man in the hire shop. How hard could it be?

Famous last words. Within twenty minutes I was hopelessly lost down a lane that seemed to consist entirely of potato fields and suspicious geese. My phone, naturally, had decided this was the perfect moment to run out of battery. I pedalled on, increasingly convinced I was heading towards Sweden by accident, until the lane simply stopped at a small wooden gate with a hand-painted sign: "HONNING." Honey. Well, I thought, if I'm going to be lost, I might as well be lost with snacks.

The honey seller turned out to be a weather-beaten chap called Henrik who spoke exactly eleven words of English and communicated mainly through expressive shrugging. He sold me a jar of something dark and miraculous, then pointed me down a path I would absolutely never have found otherwise. "Strand," he said, with the confidence of a man who had given this direction many times to idiots like me.

That path became the making of the entire trip. It wound through dense birch woodland, dappled with afternoon light, and emerged quite suddenly onto a stretch of coastline I had never seen mentioned in any guidebook. Not the main beach at Vejby Strand, which I would discover later, but a tiny cove with weathered wooden fishing huts and a single bench facing the Oresund. I sat there for an hour, eating honey from the jar with a plastic spoon I found in my pocket, feeling rather pleased with my incompetence.

The cottage itself, when I finally found it, was one of those white-painted wooden places with a steep roof and red window frames that make you feel you have wandered into a children's illustration. I was too late for the proper check-in, but the key was in the agreed hiding place and I let myself in as the light was fading. The first thing I noticed was the smell of pine and salt, that particular Scandinavian combination that makes you want to breathe more deeply than usual. The second thing I noticed was that I had left my cycling helmet somewhere in Henrik's lane. Another shrug, then. Some things are simply meant to become part of the local landscape.

I made tea with the supplies I had wisely packed, given my track record, and stood at the kitchen window watching the last of the daylight disappear over the water. The cottage was simple, unpretentious, the sort of place where you immediately stop worrying about marking the furniture or tracking sand across the floor. There was a small wood-burning stove that I had no idea how to operate, a fact that would become relevant later when the temperature dropped and I spent twenty minutes on my knees like a Victorian orphan, pleading with damp logs to catch.

But that first evening, still slightly giddy from honey and unexpected discovery, I simply stood there in my socks and felt something shift. I am not someone who normally talks about energy or vibes or whatever the current word is. I am from Birmingham. We do not do vibes. Yet there was something about that particular moment, the particular silence of that particular place, that made me aware of how much noise I normally carry around with me. The mental to-do lists, the half-formed anxieties, the low-level hum of checking my phone for nothing in particular. All of it seemed slightly absurd, there in that kitchen, with the dark water visible through the window and the faint sound of something, probably a badger, moving about in the garden.

I went to bed early, exhausted by my own incompetence, and slept better than I had in months. The next morning I would explore properly, find the actual village, work out where I was in relation to anything else. But that first night, still lost in the best possible way, I simply let myself be somewhere without knowing exactly where that somewhere was. It is a feeling I have been trying to recreate ever since, usually with considerably less success. Some things, I suppose, you can only find by accident.