I should have known the holiday had truly begun when I confidently strode up to the wrong front door, key in hand, while a very confused Danish woman peered at me through her kitchen window. Turns out Google Maps and my sense of direction had formed an unholy alliance, depositing me at number 12 instead of our actual cottage a hundred metres down the lane. Nothing says "we're not from round here" quite like attempting to let yourself into a stranger's home with the cheerful entitlement of a toddler.

The journey from Copenhagen had been blissfully straightforward, which perhaps made me overconfident. We rolled off the ferry at Rodby, pottered up through Lolland, and crossed onto Zealand proper with the sun doing that low, golden thing it does across Danish fields. The children had finally stopped asking if we were there yet, mostly because they'd discovered they could torment each other by breathing too loudly. Small mercies.

Kisserup itself announced itself with a modest sign and a sudden glimpse of water. Tuse Naes, this little peninsula jutting into Isefjord, has the sort of quiet that makes you suspicious at first. Where's the noise? The traffic? The ambient stress? We'd booked a traditional Danish summer house, one of those wooden places that dot the coastline here, and I was braced for the usual holiday rental disappointment: the suspicious sofa, the kitchen equipped with one blunt knife and a spatula that had seen things.

What we found was something rather more charming. The cottage sat back from a small track, weathered to that silvery grey that takes decades of proper Scandinavian weathering. My wife spotted it first and made that little noise she makes when something exceeds her carefully managed expectations. The garden tumbled down towards the water, not manicured exactly but comfortably settled, like a good cardigan. There were apple trees, I noticed, and the faintest whiff of something flowering that I couldn't identify and didn't need to.

Inside smelled of wood and salt and faintly of someone's well-intentioned attempt at cinnamon buns, possibly from the previous guests. The living area had that wonderful Scandinavian thing of being simultaneously modest and exactly right. Big windows, obviously. You don't come to Tuse Naes to ignore the view. I found myself standing at one like a pensioner at a bus stop, just watching a small boat putter across the fjord.

The children had already disappeared upstairs to argue about bedrooms, which I took as a positive sign. No complaints about WiFi yet, though I knew that particular reckoning was merely postponed. My wife was investigating the kitchen with the focused attention of someone who knows she'll be doing most of the cooking and wants to understand her adversary.

I made tea with the funny little Scandinavian kettle and took it outside to the terrace, where a slightly wobbly wooden table awaited. The mishap with the wrong house already felt like proper holiday lore, something we'd trot out for years. "Remember Dad tried to break into that poor woman's kitchen?" The afternoon sun was warm enough to sit out, cool enough to need a jumper. That perfect Danish in-between.

I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about how I always arrive places with my shoulders somewhere near my ears, waiting for the catch. The cottage would have something wrong, the area would disappoint, the relaxation would prove theoretical. But sitting there with my tea going cold while I watched a heron work the shoreline, I felt something shift. The simplicity of it, the deliberate modesty of a place that knows exactly what it is.

The children thundered downstairs demanding to know if there was a beach. There was, apparently, a small one nearby. Not a spectacular one, not the sort that features in brochures. Just a quiet stretch of coast where you could probably find decent stones for skimming and perhaps work out where the local ice cream situation stood.

That felt like enough. More than enough, honestly. We gathered ourselves up, slightly chaotic, slightly sun-dazzled already, and headed out to investigate what the peninsula had to offer. The wrong house already felt like a different holiday, a different version of us. This one was shaping up considerably better.