Getting to Sjusjoen was meant to be the easy part. We'd flown into Oslo, picked up the hire car, and felt rather smug about our sensible packing. That smugness lasted until the first petrol stop, where I realised I'd left my entire washbag on the bathroom shelf at home. Three hours from home, and I was already committed to a week of borrowing my wife's floral-scented moisturiser and using the children's strawberry toothpaste. The kids found this hilarious. My wife found it less so.

The drive north-east from Oslo is genuinely lovely once you stop sulking about your toiletries. The E6 gives way to smaller roads, and suddenly you're winding through forests that seem to go on forever. Hedmark has that proper Norwegian stillness about it. Not the dramatic fjord-and-mountain stuff you see on postcards, but something quieter and somehow more honest. We kept the windows down even though it was nippy, just for the smell of pine and woodsmoke.

We found the turning for Sjusjoen easily enough, though the gravel track up to the cabin had me gripping the steering wheel rather tighter than necessary. Our hire car was not exactly built for Nordic forestry. The children, naturally, were delighted by every bump and slide, shrieking as if we were on a theme park ride rather than inching up a hillside with groceries sliding about in the boot.

Then we rounded the final bend and saw it. The cabin sat there with its traditional timber walls and that distinctive red-brown stain that practically every Norwegian holiday home seems to wear. It looked properly settled into the landscape, as if it had grown there rather than been built. The surrounding trees were tall and thin, mostly birch and spruce, with the ground covered in that low, scrubby undergrowth that makes walking anywhere feel faintly adventurous.

My first job was figuring out the key safe, which involved me on tiptoes reaching above the electric meter while my wife made helpful suggestions and the children investigated a suspicious-looking mushroom. The door opened with that satisfying thunk of solid Scandinavian carpentry, and we stepped inside to the smell of warm wood and whatever cleaning product the previous guests had used.

The living area was immediately welcoming. High ceilings with exposed beams, a wood-burning stove in the corner that looked like it meant business, and windows that framed the trees like deliberate paintings. The children bolted upstairs to claim beds before we'd even set down our bags. My wife and I just stood there, listening to the absolute silence. No traffic hum, no distant aeroplanes, nothing except a faint breeze in the branches outside.

I made the mistake of attempting to light the stove straight away, having watched approximately no instructional videos on the subject. Forty minutes later, with smoke alarm narrowly avoided and my dignity in tatters, my wife took over and had it roaring within minutes. Some things, I reflected, are best left to those with patience and actual competence.

By evening, we'd unpacked our mismatched collection of borrowed toiletries and supermarket-bought replacements, and sat on the small deck with mugs of something warm. The light was doing that long, slow fade that northern summers do so beautifully, and somewhere in the trees a bird was making an optimistic evening noise. The children were already plotting tomorrow's adventures, which seemed to involve a great deal of running about and possibly a lake.

I thought about my forgotten washbag, still sitting smugly on our bathroom shelf at home. It seemed very far away, and suddenly very unimportant. Some mishaps, it turns out, are just gentle reminders that you're properly on holiday now, and the usual rules don't quite apply.