Getting to Engerdal was meant to be the easy bit. I'd done the research, booked a lovely little cabin through Novasol, and even remembered to pack my proper walking boots this time. What I hadn't accounted for was my own spectacular ability to get lost approximately five miles from nowhere.

The sat nav gave up somewhere past Elverum, which I suppose should have been flattering - it trusted me to handle the rest. It was not warranted trust. I took a wrong turn that felt right, then another that felt righter still, and before I knew it I was bumping down a gravel track wondering if I'd accidentally driven into Sweden. The mishap, though, came when I finally stopped to ask directions at what I thought was a petrol station. Turned out to be a smoked fish hut with a very enthusiastic dog tied outside. The dog jumped up, I jumped back, and my phone launched itself into a puddle of something I chose not to investigate. No maps, no signal, just me and my dignity slowly deflating in the Norwegian wilderness.

I did eventually find the cabin, mostly by following a tractor whose driver - a chap called Arne - seemed to sense my helplessness through some kind of rural sixth sense. He didn't even look surprised. Just nodded, pointed, and carried on as if rescuing lost English people was Tuesday.

The cabin itself was proper lovely. Red paint, white trim, the whole traditional deal. But what struck me first wasn't the view or the fresh air - it was the note pinned to the door. "Key under frog." I spent ten minutes looking for an actual frog before realising it was a decorative stone by the step. The owner, a woman called Ingrid who lived in the next property over, found me crouched there and didn't even try to hide her amusement.

"You're the English one," she said. Not a question. News travels fast in places with forty residents.

She invited me in for coffee before I'd even unpacked. Her kitchen was a museum of oddments - wooden spoons worn to nothing, a reindeer antler used as a coat hook, photographs of people who all seemed to share her prominent nose. She talked at me for a solid hour without requiring much response, which suited me perfectly. Her husband, she explained, was "up the hill" and had been for six years now. I offered sympathetic noises before realising she meant he was literally up the hill, tending their summer grazing land. She found my confusion hilarious.

Later that evening I ventured to the village shop, which was also the post office, which was also somehow where you booked the communal washing machine. Behind the counter sat a man called Per who looked about ninety and moved like he was underwater. I asked for milk. He asked if I was the one who'd been talking to frogs. I admitted it. He nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he'd long suspected about foreigners.

"Arne says you drive like a drunk moose," Per offered, handing over my milk.

"Arne hasn't seen me after a few of these," I replied, holding up a bottle of the local beer I'd grabbed on impulse.

Per actually smiled at that. A small one, but genuine. "Come Saturday. We have quiz. You can lose with everyone else."

I spent my first night in the cabin listening to nothing - really, properly nothing - and thinking about how I'd arrived panicked and phoneless and somehow already felt more at home than I had in months. There's something about places where people still bother to know your business, where your embarrassing moments become communal entertainment rather than private shame. I was the frog-finding, moose-driving Englishman now. That was my role, and oddly, I didn't mind it one bit.

The morning brought a knock at the door. Ingrid, with waffles and some kind of berry jam she'd made herself. "You look like you need feeding," she declared, though we'd only met once. She was right, of course. I always look like I need feeding.

She sat with me on the little porch, pointing out which hills were which, who lived where, which paths were worth walking and which were "for people with death wishes." A tractor passed - Arne again - and he raised his hand without slowing. Ingrid waved back and told me he'd been asking after my driving with genuine concern.

By the time she left, I'd learned about her daughter in Oslo who never visits, her grandson who sends postcards from places she can't pronounce, and her theory that the local elk population was deliberately obstructing traffic out of spite. I hadn't said much. I didn't need to. In these parts, it seemed, you became interesting simply by being new, by being slightly useless, by needing rescue from a smoked fish hut.

I thought about my phone in its rice bath, my abandoned sat nav, my carefully planned itinerary now in complete disarray. Then I looked at the waffles, still warm, and the mountains doing their dramatic thing in the distance, and the red paint of my little cabin glowing in the morning light.

Some mishaps, I decided, are just invitations in disguise.