Right, so picture this: it is half past six on a Friday evening, I have been driving through what feels like every fjord in southern Norway, and my nine-year-old has just asked for the fourteenth time whether we are nearly there. The answer, as it has been for the past hour, is "almost," which in parent-speak means anywhere between five minutes and another geological epoch.

We were headed for a cottage in Hemsedal, Buskerud, a part of Norway I had convinced myself I could navigate without trouble. I had printed directions, you see. Printed them. Like it was 2003. What I had failed to print was the final turning, the one after the petrol station, the one that looks like a private drive but is absolutely not a private drive according to the very small sign I missed twice. Cue me reversing a fully laden Volvo down a gravel track while a local dog watched with what I can only describe as professional disappointment.

The mishap that really made the evening, though, was the key. The property uses a lockbox, and I had the code written on my phone. My phone, which chose that precise moment to discover it had three percent battery and a sudden interest in updating its operating system. There I stood, in the sort of drizzle that is not dramatic enough to be atmospheric but wet enough to be annoying, jabbing at a dying touchscreen while my wife held her coat over my head like a human umbrella and the children began a spirited debate about who would sleep in the car.

We got in, eventually. The code worked on attempt seven, or possibly eight, by which point I had achieved that particular state of British stoicism where you are furious but pretending to find the whole thing hilarious. And then, stepping inside, everything shifted.

The cottage is one of those proper Norwegian cabin-style places, all timber walls and that faint scent of pine that makes you feel immediately healthier. The living area opens straight onto a kitchen that looks like someone actually cooks in it, not one of those holiday rentals with decorative olive oil and a single pan. My daughter made straight for the loft bedroom, which she has since declared "her apartment," and my son discovered the wood-burning stove with the reverence other children might reserve for a games console.

I stood in the middle of it all, still damp, still slightly adrenalised from the key fiasco, and felt that particular loosening that happens when a place simply fits. The valley outside was settling into evening, that soft Norwegian light that lasts for hours without ever quite committing to sunset. Somewhere in the distance, a river I could not yet see was doing its constant watery business.

We did not do much that first evening. There was a supermarket run to the Kiwi in the village, which took longer than necessary because we kept getting distracted by the sheer efficiency of Norwegian cheese packaging. We made a middling pasta sauce and ate it at the proper dining table, which felt like a small ceremony after months of sofa suppers at home. The children fought over who got the bunk nearest the window, then fell asleep almost immediately, worn out by travel and the particular oxygen of altitude.

I stayed up, selfishly, with a cup of tea that was too hot and a view of nothing much except darkness and the occasional headlight on a distant road. The stove ticked and cooled. I thought about how I had stressed over the journey, the directions, the key, all the small anxieties of arrival, and how quickly they dissolved into this: a quiet room, a sleeping family, the promise of simple days ahead.

Tomorrow we might walk to the river. We might not. There is a deck with chairs that look like they have supported generations of contemplative Norwegians, and I have every intention of testing their capacity for contemplation. The cottage asks nothing of us except presence, and after the chaos of getting here, that feels like the most reasonable request imaginable.