The drive up to Sjusjoen felt like it took roughly seventeen years, though my phone stubbornly insisted it was only four hours from Oslo. Somewhere past Hamar, my partner and I convinced ourselves we were practically locals already, humming along to dodgy Eurovision tracks and pointing at every moose warning sign like we'd never seen a yellow triangle before.

Then came the mishap. We'd stopped at a petrol station just outside Lillehammer to stock up on essentials, by which I mean bread, brown cheese, and what I genuinely believed was a small bag of coffee. It was not coffee. It was a bag of pre-ground something called "kokekaffe" which, as I discovered later whilst standing in the holiday home kitchen staring at a hob with no filter machine in sight, requires an entirely different brewing ritual involving a saucepan and what I can only describe as blind faith. I am forty-two years old and still cannot read a label properly. My partner found this hilarious for approximately six minutes, then realised they had forgotten to buy milk.

The final stretch up to Sjusjoen proper is where Norway starts showing off. The trees close in, the air gets that thin, sharp quality that makes your lungs feel slightly confused, and suddenly every bend in the road reveals another view that makes you go slightly quiet. We wound through pine forests with patches of snow still clinging on in late April, the kind of landscape that makes you feel simultaneously tiny and embarrassingly grateful.

Finding the cabin was straightforward enough, though I did manage to reverse our hire car into a snowbank that turned out to be solid enough to hold a small vehicle indefinitely. A neighbour emerged from somewhere, nodded politely, and produced a shovel with the casual efficiency of someone who has clearly rescued many hopeless tourists. I thanked him in my three words of Norwegian, which he accepted with the pained patience of a man who speaks perfect English.

The cabin itself hit that sweet spot between properly Scandinavian and comfortably lived-in. Not one of those minimalist showhomes where you're afraid to sit down, but a proper wooden place that smelled of pine and something faintly smoky from the fireplace. The key was in the lockbox exactly where promised, which felt like a small miracle given my track record with such things. I spent a good five minutes just standing in the hallway, boots still on, staring at the vaulted ceiling and the enormous windows that framed nothing but trees and distant hills.

My first impression of the main living area was basically just me saying "blimey" repeatedly. The light in that part of Hedmark is different somehow, clearer, making everything look slightly more vivid than it has any right to. The kitchen was compact but functional, once I'd worked out that the oven had approximately one setting and required the confidence of a Viking to operate properly. I made a mental note to master that kokekaffe situation before morning, or face the wrath of a caffeine-deprived companion.

Stepping onto the terrace with a cup of that eventually-successful coffee, watching the evening light do something extraordinary to the treeline, I felt that particular holiday sensation of your shoulders dropping about three inches without permission. The quiet was almost theatrical, broken only by some bird I couldn't identify and my partner dropping the milk carton inside.

We'd arrived, slightly dishevelled, under-caffeinated, and with one car tyre full of packed snow. And I already knew, standing there in my still-damp boots, that the whole daft journey had been worth every single wrong turn and misread label.