I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked suspiciously like someone's beet field. There I was, bombing down the M11 of Denmark - which is to say, a very straight road with absolutely nothing on it - convinced I was minutes from our lovely holiday home in Klegod. The voice kept saying "turn left" with increasing desperation, and I kept saying "there is no left, there's just more barley" with equal panic.

We'd already had the classic airport fiasco. I'd packed the car keys in the suitcase, which was in the boot, which needed the car keys to open. My partner stood there with that particular expression of long-suffering patience that comes from fifteen years of this sort of thing. A nice man from the hire company eventually took pity on us, though I suspect he was mostly worried we'd hold up the queue until Christmas.

Three hours of driving through West Jutland and the landscape had done that thing where it becomes almost abstract. Flat fields, big sky, occasional wind turbine doing a slow wave like a giant white friend. The North Sea was somewhere to our left, invisible but somehow present, like a guest you haven't met yet but who's definitely brought a bottle.

The sat nav finally gave up entirely about two miles from Klegod. Just silence. I took this as a sign to trust my instincts, which was immediately revealed as a terrible idea when I turned down a gravel track that grew progressively more gravelly until it was essentially just a pile of stones with pretensions. We bottomed out twice. My partner made a small noise like a disappointed kettle.

When we finally found the actual road, the proper one with signs and everything, I felt the peculiar triumph of someone who has survived entirely self-inflicted problems. The holiday home appeared suddenly, tucked among low dunes with that particular Scandinavian modesty - not showing off, but definitely smug about its excellent location.

I will not describe what happened with the key safe. There was a code, there was a mechanism, there was a period of about ten minutes where I genuinely believed we'd be sleeping in the car after all. The wind had picked up by this point, that proper North Sea wind that makes you understand why everyone here builds things low and solid. It was trying to steal the instructions I'd printed out, which I clutched like a talisman against further incompetence.

Then the door opened, and I stepped inside, and the chaos of the journey suddenly felt worth it. The place smelled of pine and salt and that particular clean warmth of a well-kept holiday home. Big windows framed the dunes in a way that felt almost greedy, like we'd won something we didn't deserve. I could hear the sea properly now, not the idea of it but the actual thing, rhythmic and indifferent to our small struggles.

My partner was already investigating the kitchen with the focused attention of someone who has not eaten a proper meal since Gatwick. I stood in the living area, still holding my ridiculous sheaf of wind-battered papers, and felt that particular holiday feeling - the slight dislocation of being somewhere new, the pleasant exhaustion of travel, the quiet hope that you might actually relax this time despite all evidence to the contrary.

I went to open the patio door for some air, managed to jam my thumb in the handle, and decided this was probably enough achievement for one afternoon. The dunes waited outside, patient and ancient. The wind continued its commentary. Somewhere, I suspected, the sat nav was already plotting fresh betrayals for the journey home.