The drive up to Sjusjoen from Oslo had taken the best part of three hours, and by the time I spotted the turn-off for the cabin, my backside had gone completely numb. My partner, ever the navigator, was squinting at her phone while I squinted at the snow, which seemed to be getting deeper by the minute. "Left here," she said. I turned left. Straight into a ditch.

Well, not a proper ditch. More of a gentle, snowy embankment that had looked remarkably like a driveway in the fading light. There we sat, wheels spinning, both of us too stubborn to say anything for a good thirty seconds. A chap on a snowmobile eventually towed us out, grinning the entire time as if this happened to British tourists every Tuesday. Which, to be fair, it probably does.

By the time we actually found the right track and crunched up to the cabin, I was ready to kiss the ground. Except the ground was frozen solid and covered in half a metre of snow, so I settled for a dramatic collapse onto the porch instead. The key was in the lockbox exactly where the email had said, though my fingers were too cold to work the code for an embarrassingly long time. I stood there, hunched and muttering, while my partner filmed the whole thing for posterity. Some holiday memories are best left unshared.

Then we stepped inside.

I have stayed in enough holiday rentals to know the spectrum. At one end, the grim places with suspicious stains and a smell you cannot quite place. At the other, those rare finds that make you exhale the moment you cross the threshold. This cabin sat firmly at the good end, possibly nudging into excellent. The wood burner was already set with kindling, which some thoughtful soul had arranged, and the air carried that particular smell of pine and old timber that no air freshener has ever successfully faked.

The living room opened up with windows facing the forest, and even in the darkness I could sense the scale of it, the weight of all those trees and snow. We flicked on every light in the place, suddenly giddy with relief and the peculiar energy that comes from being somewhere new. The kitchen was compact but properly equipped, not one of those rentals where you open a drawer to find a single bent fork and a can opener from 1973. I made tea with the fervour of a man who had nearly died in a snowy embankment, which felt entirely proportionate.

Upstairs, the bedrooms were simple, wooden, uncluttered. The kind of spaces that force you to slow down because there is simply nothing else to do. I stood at the small window in ours, cup in hand, watching snow settle on the railing outside. My partner had already found the sauna and was making happy noises from somewhere down the corridor.

That first evening, we did almost nothing. Ate crackers and cheese because the shops in Lillehammer had closed before we arrived. Sat in front of the fire with our feet up, too tired to properly unpack. I kept catching myself grinning at nothing in particular, the way you do when a place already feels right before you have even slept there. The mishap with the ditch had become funny, which these things always do once you are warm and safe and someone else has done the hard work of pulling you free.

Outside, the temperature dropped and the snow kept falling. Inside, the logs crackled and the old cabin settled around us, creaking comfortably in the cold. I thought about how I would describe this to friends back home, and realised I would probably lead with the ditch story because that is what people expect from me. But the truth, the bit I would keep for myself, was that moment by the window with the tea going cold in my hand, feeling the particular quiet of a Norwegian forest at night, already knowing I would not want to leave.