I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving car quite so badly either. The journey to Karrebaeksminde should have taken a straightforward hour and a half from Copenhagen, but somehow I managed to turn it into a three-hour tour of every single farm track in southern Zealand. There was a moment, somewhere near a field of very judgemental-looking cows, where I became convinced I had accidentally driven into a different country entirely. The sat nav, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that what looked like a gravel path between two hedgerows was definitely a main road. Reader, it was not a main road. My little hire car made sounds I did not think cars were capable of making. I emerged at the other end with a newfound respect for Danish agricultural infrastructure and absolutely no idea where I was.

By the time I actually found the holiday home, I was in that particular state of frazzled delirium where everything becomes either hilarious or deeply upsetting, with no middle ground. The cottage sat back from a quiet lane, all red wooden cladding and white window frames, looking impossibly picturesque against the grey September sky. I stumbled out of the car, still laughing at my own incompetence, and immediately encountered my first local character. Bent, the neighbour, appeared from behind a hedge as if he had been waiting specifically for this moment of maximum vulnerability. He was perhaps seventy, wearing a flat cap that had seen better decades, and carrying a pair of gardening shears with the casual confidence of a man who had never once doubted his place in the world.

"You have been driving in circles," he announced, not as a question. His English was excellent but deployed sparingly, as if each word cost him personally. I admitted that yes, I had indeed been driving in circles, and possibly also ovals and the occasional figure eight. Bent nodded slowly, processing this information with the gravity of a judge considering a particularly unusual case. "The sat nav," he said, with the particular tone Danes reserve for discussing things they find mildly disappointing but not worth getting upset about. "Yes," I agreed. We stood in contemplative silence for a moment, two men united in our quiet disapproval of satellite technology.

He helped me with the key box, which I had been jabbing at with the approximate technique of a confused badger, and pointed out that I had been trying to open it upside down. This felt entirely on brand for my day. As I finally got the door open, Bent mentioned that his wife Inge would be round tomorrow with some fresh eggs, and that I should not be alarmed if I heard strange noises in the morning. "Geese," he said, by way of explanation, though this explained very little. Then he vanished back behind his hedge, mission accomplished, leaving me to explore my temporary home.

The cottage smelled of pine and something else I could not identify, something clean and slightly salty that I later realised was simply the smell of being properly near the sea. The living room had that particular Scandinavian quality of being simultaneously minimal and deeply cosy, with a wood burner sitting in the corner like a promise. I opened the doors to the little wooden terrace and stood there for a while, listening to nothing much at all, feeling the particular kind of tired that comes from actual travel rather than just moving between places.

Later, walking down to the harbour to find somewhere to eat, I passed a man on a bicycle who rang his bell at me in what felt like a friendly warning rather than greeting. The harbour itself was quiet, a few boats bobbing at their moorings, the water that particular flat grey that makes you understand why Scandinavians have so many words for different kinds of darkness. I found a small restaurant, more of a canteen really, where a woman called Lene took my order without ever quite making eye contact, as if direct eye contact with tourists was something she had learned to ration carefully. She recommended the fish soup in a way that suggested refusal would be noted and remembered, so I had the fish soup. It was extraordinary, thick with chunks of white fish and something sharp and green that cut through the creaminess perfectly.

I ate slowly, watching the light fade over the water, listening to a group of elderly men at the next table argue about something in Danish with the comfortable rhythm of people who had been having the same argument for decades. One of them caught me listening and raised his glass in a sort of general toast to strangers who cannot understand what is being said. I raised my glass back. It felt like sufficient communication.

Walking back to the cottage in the dark, slightly full of good soup and local beer, I thought about how I had arrived. The wrong turns, the gravel tracks, the judgemental cows, Bent emerging from his hedge like some kind of guardian spirit of minor travel disasters. There is something about being slightly lost that makes you more available to a place, I think. You cannot maintain your usual defences when you have just spent forty minutes apologising to a sat nav. You arrive already slightly undone, already needing something from where you have ended up, and perhaps that means you actually see it properly.

The geese, Bent had mentioned. I had not heard any geese yet, but I was listening for them now, already curious, already prepared to be surprised. That felt like the right way to begin.