I have never been so grateful to see a wooden hut in my entire life. After six hours of driving from Oslo, two wrong turns caused by me smugly insisting I knew a shortcut, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that definitely developed a personality disorder somewhere around Honefoss, we finally crunched up the gravel track to Tempelseter. The shortcut, by the way, added forty minutes and introduced our children to vocabulary they are absolutely not allowed to repeat at school.

The mishap that defined our arrival was entirely my fault, which I can admit now that I have survived it. Somewhere near the turnoff, I spotted what I was certain was a reindeer. I yelled "REINDEER" with the urgency of someone spotting a runaway volcano, slammed the brakes, and leaped from the car with my phone ready. It was a plastic bag caught on a fence post. My wife did not speak to me for the next twenty minutes. The children found this hilarious, which made it worse. The plastic bag flapped at me in what I can only describe as mockery.

But then the cabin appeared through the birch trees, and everything else fell away. Tempelseter sits in that particular Norwegian way where the building looks like it grew from the hillside rather than being placed upon it. Red wooden walls, white trim, a proper wood-burning stove visible through the window. My wife broke her silence to say "oh, that's lovely," which in our marriage counts as enthusiastic praise. The children had already abandoned the car and were attempting to climb a rock that I suspect has been climbed by every child who has ever stayed here since approximately 1890.

Inside, the smell hit me first. Not the musty damp you sometimes get with mountain cabins, but proper dry wood and something faintly of coffee, as if the previous guests had left their morning behind as a welcome. The main room is simple in that deeply satisfying Scandinavian way. Wooden floors that creak in specific spots, a long table that could seat eight if you were friendly about it, windows that frame the valley like someone very thoughtful designed the view to order. I found myself standing at the sink for longer than necessary, just washing mugs and watching the light change on the hills opposite.

The kitchen is compact but properly equipped, not one of those holiday rentals where you open a drawer and find a single bent fork and a can opener from 1973. We had brought supplies from the supermarket in Gol, which is about twenty minutes back down the road. My wife had insisted on proper Norwegian brown cheese, which the children regard with the suspicion they usually reserve for my cooking. I had insisted on enough coffee to fuel a small nation. Both decisions proved correct within hours.

The bedrooms are upstairs under sloping ceilings that remind you constantly that you are in a cabin, not a hotel. I cracked my head twice on the first evening, which my family found as funny as the plastic bag incident. There is something about low beams that forces a kind of humility. You cannot stride about feeling important when you are ducking to enter your own bedroom.

By evening, the stove was crackling, the brown cheese had been sampled and rejected by the children in favour of more sensible bread and jam, and I was sitting with my feet up reading a book I had brought specifically to not finish. That is the thing about a place like Tempelseter. The ambition drains out of you in the best possible way. You stop planning, stop checking your phone for signal that barely exists, stop being the person who yells about plastic bags on fence posts.

We fell asleep to absolute silence, broken only by my wife laughing once in the dark about the reindeer. I pretended not to hear, but I was smiling too.