I'd driven from Esbjerg with that particular mix of optimism and mild dread that comes from navigating Danish country roads in a hire car slightly too large for its own good. The sat-nav had given up three roundabouts ago, and I was now relying on a crumpled printout and what I loosely termed "instinct." Sondervig, I had been assured, was impossible to miss. It is, in fact, remarkably easy to miss if you are busy arguing with yourself about whether you have already missed it.

The property sat at the end of a gravel track, flanked by those low, wind-sculpted hedges you only seem to get in West Jutland. Proper Danish summer cottage territory. White timber, dark roof, the whole understated Scandinavian package. I pulled up feeling rather pleased with myself, which was precisely when I discovered the key safe code I had scribbled on my phone was actually the booking reference. Different numbers entirely. I stood there in the driveway, wheelie case handle still extended like some pathetic mechanical limb, trying combinations with increasing desperation while a herring gull watched from the fence with what I can only describe as theatrical judgment.

Twenty minutes. I tried for twenty minutes. My dignity left somewhere around minute twelve when I started talking to the gull, explaining my predicament as if it might offer assistance. It did not. Eventually, in that way these things happen, I found the actual code buried in a confirmation email I had somehow managed not to read properly. The safe clicked open. I may have said something triumphant and slightly rude to the bird.

The door swung inward and I was hit by that particular smell of a holiday let that has been closed up, cleaned thoroughly, and left waiting. Faintly of pine, faintly of nothing, with an undertone of someone's else's careful life temporarily removed. I dumped my case in the hallway and immediately walked into a kitchen cupboard I had mistaken for a doorway. The layout, I would learn, was perfectly logical once you stopped assuming British cottage logic applied. Danish cottages have their own ideas about circulation. I rubbed my shin and laughed, properly, for the first time since leaving home.

The living area opened up beyond, all light wood and that restrained Danish palette that makes you feel simultaneously calm and vaguely underdressed. Huge windows faced west, and the late afternoon was doing something extraordinary with the North Sea light. I had read about this, the particular quality of illumination here where the land meets the water in such flat, insistent proximity. Seeing it felt like being let in on a secret. I stood there with my shin still throbbing, suddenly aware of how much tension I had been carrying in my shoulders, how tightly I had been gripping the steering wheel for hours.

I made tea with the electric kettle, because I am British and this is non-negotiable even when abroad. The mug was the wrong shape, too tall and narrow, and I burned my lip because I had not let it cool sufficiently. Three mishaps in under an hour. A personal record, possibly. I took it to the small wooden deck anyway, nursing my lip, watching the light shift across the dunes I could just glimpse beyond the neighbouring cottages.

A woman walked past on the track with a dog that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts. She nodded. I nodded back. Neither of us spoke, which felt exactly right. The gull had not followed me, or if it had, it was keeping its opinions to itself for once.

I thought about dinner, about the little supermarket in Sondervig village I had spotted during my earlier circling. I thought about how I would need to drive there, how I would probably get lost again despite it being approximately seven minutes away. I thought about how I had spent months looking forward to this, to solitude and sea air and escape, and how the reality was already proving messier and more ridiculous than the imagined version.

The tea was still too hot. The light was fading towards something spectacular. My shin would bruise, I suspected. And I was, despite everything, already more here than I had been in months.