The drive up to Sjusjoen had been going suspiciously well, which in my experience is always a warning sign. Three hours from Oslo, the scenery shifting from sensible farmland to proper Norwegian drama, and not a single wrong turn. I was practically smug about it. Then I discovered I'd been following the sat nav to a farm track that dead-ended in someone's sheep enclosure. Turns out "Sjusjoen" and "Sjusjoenvegen" are not, in fact, interchangeable. The farmer who found me reversing in circles was terribly polite about the whole thing, which only made me feel more of a prat.

By the time I actually rolled up to the proper cabin, the afternoon light was doing that golden thing it does in Hedmark, low and generous across the birch trees. The place sat there looking impossibly Scandinavian, all dark wood and sensible angles, with a deck that practically demanded a cup of coffee and some smugness about one's life choices. I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of someone who'd just spent twenty minutes apologising to livestock and stepped out to explore.

The weather had been playing games all week. The forecast said warm, almost suspiciously so for the season, and I had packed with the optimism of someone who believes BBC Weather's international cousins. My grand plan had been proper mountain walking, the kind where you earn your evening meal through thigh-burn and righteous suffering. But the locals at the little shop in Sjusjoen village, a ten-minute wander down the road, had laughed gently when I mentioned my ambitions. "The coast," said the woman behind the counter, as if this explained everything. She meant the lake coast, of course - Mjosa and the smaller waters that finger through this landscape like someone spilled something and never quite mopped it up.

So I adapted, which is what you do when the mountains are technically accessible but the warm weather has turned the lower trails into something between a bog and a moral test. The lake paths became my territory instead. I found a route along the water's edge, nothing dramatic on paper, just birch and pine giving way to proper Nordic shoreline, the kind of rounded rocks that have been smoothed by ice and indifference over millennia. The warm air sat heavy some afternoons, bringing that particular stillness where even the insects seem lazy. I'd walk for an hour, find a rock, sit with my feet near the water, and feel smug in an entirely different way than I'd planned.

The weather turned theatrical on my third day. I'd set out under proper sunshine, shorts and everything, only to watch a front roll in from what felt like nowhere. The temperature dropped ten degrees in an hour, the wind picked up, and I found myself doing that British thing of refusing to acknowledge discomfort until it becomes genuinely dangerous. I sheltered under a pine that offered approximately no protection, laughed at my own stubbornness, and eventually admitted defeat. The walk back was brisk, verging on pathetic, my warm-weather optimism sodden and ridiculous.

That evening, drying off by the cabin's wood burner with a cup of something medicinal, I had one of those moments of clarity that holidays sometimes grant. I'd come chasing mountain grandeur and instead found something smaller, more particular. The lake coast in warm weather has its own quiet drama - the way light moves across water, how the birch leaves turn silver in certain winds, the particular silence of a place that's used to emptiness. My mishap with the sat nav had set the tone without me realising: this was a trip about adjusting, about finding the path that actually exists rather than the one I'd drawn in my head.

The remaining days, I walked differently. Still the lake routes, still the warm afternoons that occasionally turned on me, but with less agenda. I learned to start early when the air held freshness, to read the sky's mood rather than the forecast's promises, to carry a layer because smugness about packing light is cold comfort when the wind shifts. On my final morning, I found a spot where the coastline curved into a small bay, the water still enough to show proper reflections, and sat there until the midges drove me off.

I left Sjusjoen with damp boots, slightly sunburned shoulders, and the certain knowledge that I would return. Probably still with an overambitious walking plan. Probably still getting lost within sight of my destination. But perhaps, just perhaps, a bit quicker to swap the mountain for the coast when the weather makes the suggestion.