I have never trusted a sat nav less than the one guiding me to Skaven Strand. Three hours out of Billund, having successfully navigated the hire car past more wind turbines than I thought existed in one country, I found myself directed down what I can only describe as a gravel path with pretensions. The kind of path that laughs at suspension. My companion, who had insisted on bringing an actual paper map "just in case," unfolded it with the smugness of someone who had predicted the apocalypse and brought tinned goods. We were, according to both technologies, simultaneously on the right road and about to drive into the North Sea.

The mishap came at a roundabout near Ringkobing, where I became so distracted by a man on a bicycle carrying what appeared to be an entire fishing net over his shoulder that I missed our exit entirely. This led to an unscheduled tour of someone's farmyard, a brief conversation with a dog, and twenty minutes of silent recrimination in the car. We arrived at the holiday home with the sun already doing that low, golden thing it does in West Jutland, which I later learned is basically all it ever does in summer.

The property itself sat among similar wooden cottages, all slightly apologetic about their existence, as if they had washed up there and decided to stay. Ours had a deck that creaked meaningfully underfoot and windows that seemed designed to frame particular views of the fjord. I stood on that deck with a cup of tea that tasted of the journey, watching a heron stand in the shallow water with the patience of someone queuing at the post office.

What struck me first was the quiet. Not silence exactly, because there was wind, and water, and somewhere a dog with opinions. But the kind of quiet that makes you aware of your own breathing, which I found faintly alarming. I am from a city where quiet means something has gone wrong.

We walked down to the strand itself that first evening, boots on the gravel path, and met our first proper local. An older man collecting something from the low tide line, dressed in the uniform of the region: practical trousers, a jumper that had seen things, and wellies with the resigned look of footwear that knew its purpose. He straightened up as we approached, and I prepared my terrible Danish, but he spoke first in English that carried the particular accent of someone who had learned it from BBC radio in the seventies.

"You're staying in the yellow one," he said. It was not a question. "The Germans were there last week. Very tidy people, Germans." He said this with the weight of comparison, looking at my untucked shirt and the leaf that had somehow attached itself to my hair during the farmyard incident. He told us he was collecting bladderwrack for his neighbour's garden, a sentence I had never expected to hear in my life, and that the fjord was "low today, moody, like my wife before coffee." He laughed at his own joke with a wheeze, then pointed out where the path became impassable at high tide, information delivered with the gravity of a warning about landmines.

That first night, we cooked badly in the holiday home's determinedly adequate kitchen, using ingredients from a supermarket in Ringkobing where the cashier had examined our foreign credit card with the suspicion usually reserved for counterfeit currency. The window over the sink framed a sky that seemed to contain more stars than I had permission to view. I kept returning to the deck, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of previous holidays, listening to the water move against the shore in a rhythm I had no context for.

I realised something standing there, slightly cold, slightly ridiculous in borrowed wool. I had spent months planning this trip, researching distances and attractions and the optimal time to visit the lighthouse at Bovbjerg. Yet here I was, two hours from anywhere I had marked on a map, talking to a man about seaweed, and feeling more present than I had in months. The mishap at the roundabout, the sat nav's betrayal, the farmyard dog, all of it had delivered me somewhere I had not planned to be, which was perhaps the point.

The heron was still there when I went inside, or perhaps it was a different heron, carrying on the shift. I made a note to learn its Danish name, though I knew I would forget. Some things you collect without meaning to, the way that man collected bladderwrack, the way the fjord collected light at certain hours. The holiday had begun, and I had already lost my bearings, which felt, for the first time, like arriving exactly where I needed to be.