I have never been brilliant with directions, so it will surprise no one that I managed to get us lost somewhere between Gol and Hemsedal despite the satnav doing its best. We had stopped at a petrol station for coffee and what I can only describe as a suspicious hot dog, and somehow I turned the wrong way out of the car park and drove twenty minutes up a valley that got progressively narrower and more alarmingly vertical. My partner sat in silence, which I have learned is far worse than actual complaining. When we finally found a farm track wide enough to turn around, a sheep looked at me with what I can only describe as professional disappointment. Not my finest hour.

By the time we reached the cabin, I was ready to abandon the car and simply live in it. But then we stepped out into that extraordinary stillness, and everything else fell away. The place sat nestled into the hillside with views down the valley that made my little navigational disaster feel like it had happened in another lifetime. The air smelled of pine and something else I could not identify but immediately wanted to bottle. We stood there like two people who had forgotten how to use their legs, just breathing and blinking in the extraordinary light.

The cabin itself had that perfect Scandinavian balance of being properly cosy without trying too hard. Wooden walls that made everything feel warm even when the temperature outside suggested otherwise. A deck that caught the morning sun and held onto it with greedy determination. I had brought three books with the optimistic intention of reading them all, and I could already picture myself failing gloriously at this while horizontal on one of the outdoor chairs.

We did not do much that first afternoon, which was precisely the point. Unpacked with embarrassing slowness. Made tea that went cold because we kept wandering back outside to look at the same view from slightly different angles. Watched the light change across the mountains and pretended this counted as an activity. It did, of course. It absolutely did.

The following days settled into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as a rhythm at all. Mornings on the deck with coffee and whichever book I was currently not finishing. The sun moved slowly across the sky, and we moved with it, shifting chairs like professional sunflowers. Occasionally one of us would suggest a walk, and we would set off with ambitious plans that gradually deflated into a stroll to the nearby river, where we would sit on rocks and throw stones with the athletic competence of tired children.

There was a small shop in Hemsedal village where we bought bread and cheese and something the owner assured us was local honey. I have no way of verifying this, but it tasted of somewhere specific, which was enough. We ate simple meals outside, watching the evening light do extraordinary things to the mountainsides. Conversation slowed to match the pace of everything else. We discussed whether the bird on the fence post was the same one from yesterday, whether clouds could look tired, whether we had ever been this consistently horizontal before.

I am normally someone who measures holidays by what I have seen or done, ticking invisible boxes with restless efficiency. Here, the achievement was in the not-doing. In letting the sun warm my legs until I felt pleasantly useless. In reading the same paragraph three times because a bumblebee had landed on the page and demanded attention. In walking slowly enough to notice how many different greens existed in one small patch of hillside.

On our last morning, I woke early and took my coffee outside in the pale dawn light. The valley lay quiet and the mountains stood there being magnificent without any audience except me. I thought about the wrong turn that had started everything, the sheep's judgmental face, the hot dog I was still not entirely convinced had been food. None of it mattered. I had come to Hemsedal and done almost nothing, and it had been absolutely everything I needed.