I have never been so relieved to see a wooden shed in my entire life. After six hours of driving from Oslo, two of them spent crawling through mountain fog that made me feel like I was piloting a submarine rather than a Vauxhall Astra, we finally spotted the little red cabin perched on the hillside above Eggedal. My wife had been navigating, my two children had been conducting a sustained campaign of backseat warfare, and I had been quietly questioning every life choice that led me to believe a self-catering holiday in rural Norway was a sensible idea.

The mishap, because there is always a mishap with us, occurred precisely three minutes after arrival. I had taken the car keys, marched triumphantly to what I assumed was the front door, and spent a solid five minutes wrestling with a lock that simply would not budge. I tried every key. I jiggled. I whispered encouraging profanities. I may have briefly considered shoulder-barging a building that was clearly older than my grandmother. Eventually my daughter wandered round the side, bored of my performance, and called out that there was another door. The actual front door. The one with the proper key. The one that opened immediately. I stood there in the porch light, defeated by Scandinavian architecture, while my family filed past me without a word.

But then, stepping inside, something shifted. The cabin had that particular smell of old timber and wood smoke that no candle company has ever successfully replicated. The living room was dominated by a proper stove, the kind you feed with logs rather than vague hopes, and through the windows the last of the evening light was catching the ridge of trees above the village. My son immediately claimed the little sleeping loft, my wife began investigating the kitchen with the focused attention of someone who takes self-catering extremely seriously, and I found myself standing quite still, listening to nothing but the wind in the pines.

The kitchen was compact but capable, with a table that would clearly become our headquarters for the week. I could already picture the morning coffee ritual, the slow breakfasts while the children eventually drifted downstairs in varying states of consciousness. The bedrooms were simple, almost monastic, with wool blankets and the faint creak of floorboards that spoke of decades of Norwegian families coming here to escape precisely the kind of chaos we had brought with us.

That first evening, we did not venture far. We unpacked badly, ate bread and cheese from the supermarket in Vikersund, and sat around the stove as I made a hash of lighting it. A local man had left a neat stack of firewood in the lean-to, and I felt unreasonably proud when I finally got a proper blaze going, even if I did singe my eyebrows slightly in the process. My wife laughed, the children roasted marshmallows on sticks that were probably too green and sputtered accordingly, and I sat back in a chair that had been moulded by someone else's comfortable evenings.

I kept thinking about that wrong door. How easily I had committed to the struggle, how convinced I was that brute persistence would triumph over simple observation. There is probably a metaphor there, something about slowing down and looking around, but I will spare us both. What I know is this: by the time the stove had burned down to embers and the children had trudged off to their loft, I was already dreading the journey home. Not because the cabin was luxurious. It was not. But because it was exactly enough, and sometimes that is the thing you do not know you need until you are standing in the wrong doorway, wondering why nothing will give.