I have never been so grateful to see a gravel driveway in all my life. After six hours of driving from Oslo, my partner and I finally pulled up to our cabin in Nesbyen, only to realise I had been confidently navigating us to Myking using a postcode I had invented from memory. We spent an extra forty minutes circling what I can only describe as an extremely scenic patch of nothing, while I maintained that the sat nav was "probably just having a moment." It was not. I was. We arrived flustered, slightly bickering, and deeply in need of the very thing this place promised: absolutely nothing.

The cabin sat among birch trees with the Hallingdalselva river glinting somewhere below, and the first thing that struck me was how aggressively peaceful it was. No traffic hum, no distant motorway, just a woodpecker having what sounded like a very productive morning and the occasional creak of the porch swing. We dumped our bags, made tea with the urgency of people who had been mildly traumatised by their own incompetence, and collapsed onto the wooden deck. The sun was doing that low, golden thing it does in Norwegian valleys, and I felt my shoulders drop about three inches.

We had grand plans, of course. We always do. There was talk of driving to some waterfall, of proper hikes with packed lunches, of being the kind of people who stride purposefully through nature with sensible socks. But the next morning, the sun appeared with what I can only describe as commitment. It streamed through the cabin windows at six, warming the pine walls and making the kitchen smell like hot coffee and possibility. We took our mugs outside in dressing gowns, watched mist lift off the river, and by nine had mutually, silently agreed that today was cancelled.

I have never read so much in my life. I brought three books and finished two, mostly while horizontal on that porch swing, occasionally shifting to follow the sun like a lazy sundial. My partner attempted a crossword, abandoned it, and fell asleep with the pencil still in hand. We made sandwiches at odd hours, ate them standing at the kitchen counter looking at nothing in particular, and wandered down to the riverbank in flip-flops to dip our toes in water that was technically too cold for civilised people but felt marvellous anyway.

The gentle exploration happened by accident, really. On day three, motivated mostly by needing to walk off an impressive quantity of brown cheese, we strolled along the river path toward Nesbyen village. It took forty minutes because we stopped every few metres to examine a mushroom, watch a dipper bird bobbing on a rock, or simply stand in a patch of sunlight like cats. The village itself was small and unhurried, a handful of wooden houses painted in those soft Scandinavian colours that make British seaside towns look hysterical by comparison. We bought ice creams, sat on a bench, and watched a man slowly mow a very large lawn. It was riveting.

By our final morning, I had achieved a state of being I can only describe as aggressively relaxed. I was tanned in patches where the sun had found me through the birch leaves. I had a small stack of finished books, a minor river stone collection, and absolutely no desire to check my phone. The drive back to Oslo felt longer, not because of the distance, but because I was leaving behind a version of myself I rather liked: the one who could spend twenty minutes watching a cloud change shape and call it an afternoon well spent.