I have never been so relieved to see a wooden shed with a slightly crooked chimney in all my life. After six hours of driving from Esbjerg, during which our youngest was sick in a carrier bag just outside Ringkobing and the sat-nav tried to send us through what I can only describe as a shallow lake, the Bork Havn holiday home appeared like a mirage. A very Scandinavian, very practical mirage with decking and a barbecue.

The mishap, because there is always one, came during the final mile. I had been boasting for at least twenty minutes about my superior navigation skills, having finally abandoned technology for old-fashioned road signs. "Trust me," I told my wife, gesturing at a sign for Bork Havn that looked perfectly legitimate. It was not. It led us to a dead end behind a fishing warehouse, where a man in overalls watched us perform a twelve-point turn in silence. He did not wave. Danish warehouse men, I have learned, are not easily impressed by British driving.

We finally found the correct road, a narrow gravel track between low dunes and scrubby grass, and there it was: our little red-roofed cottage, tucked among similar holiday homes, all of them sensible and welcoming and slightly identical in that comforting way. The key was in the lockbox exactly as promised, which felt like a minor miracle after our journey. I fumbled the code twice, conscious of my wife's patient silence behind me, before the box clicked open with what I can only call Scandinavian efficiency.

Stepping inside, the first thing that struck me was the smell. Not the musty dampness of British seaside rentals, but something clean and woody, like pine and salt air and the ghost of a thousand previous family breakfasts. The kitchen was compact but unnervingly well-equipped, the sort of place where you suddenly feel inadequate about your own cutlery drawer at home. I opened a cupboard and found not the usual jumble of mismatched plates, but actual matching bowls. It was unsettling. I closed it again.

The children had already vanished into the bunk bedroom, whose ladder they would later treat as a climbing frame with a mortality rate I chose not to contemplate. My wife walked straight through to the terrace doors, flung them open, and stood there in that particular silence that means she is appreciating something properly. I joined her. Beyond the small garden, beyond the other cottages, lay the flat grey shimmer of the fjord, with boats bobbing at anchor and the low line of dunes beyond. The wind was doing that proper West Jutland thing, constant and insistent, carrying the smell of seaweed and somewhere distant, someone else's barbecue.

I realised then, standing there with my hand on the slightly sticky door handle, that this was exactly what we needed. Not adventure, not discovery, just this: a wooden box near the water where we could be slightly incompetent together, where the children could argue about who got the top bunk, where I could fail at lighting the barbecue and nobody would mind much.

The crooked chimney, I noticed, was not crooked at all. It was my perspective, skewed by tiredness and the particular madness of family travel. Everything here was straight and true and quietly waiting for us to slow down enough to notice.