I have never been so grateful to see a wooden cabin in my life. After six hours of driving from Oslo, two wrong turns near Lillehammer, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that seemed convinced Sjusjoen was in Sweden, we finally crunched up the gravel track to our little place in the woods. The kids were asleep in the back, my partner was giving me the look that says "I told you to turn left at that petrol station," and I was absolutely bursting for the loo. Holiday bliss, Norwegian style.

The mishap, though. I must tell you about the mishap. In my excitement to stretch my legs, I leapt from the car and marched straight to what I assumed was the front door. Turned the key, pushed hard, nearly took the thing off its hinges. Only then did I notice the wellington boots that were definitely not ours, the smell of someone else's dinner cooking, and a very confused Norwegian chap peering round the corner with a wooden spoon in his hand. Wrong cabin. Third one along, apparently. I backed out apologising in a weird mixture of English and GCSE French, which made absolutely no sense to either of us, and shuffled back to the car to find my entire family awake and howling with laughter. Not my finest hour. But honestly, it broke the tension beautifully.

Our actual cabin was worth the wait. Proper timber construction, that gorgeous honey colour you only get from years of proper Scandinavian weathering. A little terrace out front where you could sit with a coffee and pretend you were a person who did cross-country skiing before breakfast. Inside, it smelled of pine and woodsmoke and that particular clean, cold air that seems to follow you in from the mountains. The kids immediately claimed the loft bedroom, which meant my partner and I got the ground floor room with the actual comfortable mattress. Small victories.

What struck me first was the quiet. Not the awkward, oppressive quiet of an empty house, but the deep, settled silence of a place that has nothing to prove. Just the occasional creak of the wood, the distant sound of a dog somewhere, the wind moving through the spruce trees. We are used to the constant background hum of London, so this felt almost theatrical, like someone had pressed mute on the world.

The kitchen was simple and genuinely useful, not one of those holiday places where every drawer contains a single bent teaspoon and a mysterious plastic object from 1987. We unpacked our supplies from Elverum, made a pot of coffee in the proper Scandinavian way, and stood at the window watching the light change over the hillside. The children, miraculously, were playing a board game without arguing. I think the altitude does something to them.

By evening, we had established our positions. My partner on the sofa with a book she would not finish. The kids plotting some outdoor adventure for the morning. Me at the little dining table, already googling whether the local shop sold fishing permits and whether I could reasonably pretend to know what I was doing. The wood burner was crackling, someone had found a packet of biscuits, and the whole wrong-cabin embarrassment was already becoming family legend.

That first night, I slept better than I had in months. The kind of sleep where you wake up unsure what day it is and not particularly bothered about finding out. Outside, the Norwegian darkness had settled in properly, and somewhere in the hills, a proper winter was gathering itself for the months ahead. We had arrived, slightly ridiculous, definitely unprepared, but completely ready to do very little at all for a while. And I cannot think of anything more perfect than that.