I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked suspiciously like someone's back garden just outside Oslo. Three flights, a rental car upgrade I absolutely did not need but panicked into, and one very questionable petrol station hot dog later, I finally found myself winding through the forests of Hedmark with nothing but pine trees and the vague hope that I had not just committed to a week in the wilderness.

The thing about driving to Trysil is that it lulls you. The roads are so quiet, so relentlessly scenic, that you forget to pay attention to actual details. Like, for instance, whether your phone charger is still working. Mine gave up somewhere near Elverum, which is precisely when I realised I had screenshotted the property directions rather than saving them properly. Classic. There I was, squinting at a thumbnail image of a map while trying not to drive into a ditch, absolutely convinced I was about to become a local legend. "British tourist found living in spruce tree, claims he was 'basically there anyway.'"

I was not basically there. I was, in fact, spectacularly lost for a solid forty minutes, doing increasingly desperate laps of what I now suspect was the same junction three times. The mishap that really sealed it, though, was the gate. The property has one of those wooden farm gates, the kind that looks rustic and charming in photographs and absolutely nothing like that when you are trying to open it one-handed in drizzle while your car gently rolls backwards. I may have sworn. I may have sworn quite inventively. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, judgmentally.

But then I actually got through, and everything stopped.

The cabin sat there looking thoroughly pleased with itself, all timber and proper Norwegian common sense, with a view down towards the river that made me forget I had just performed what felt like a small-scale vehicle relocation disaster. The air smelled of woodsmoke and wet earth and something else I could not place, probably just "not the M25," which I had been craving without knowing it. I stood there with my ridiculous oversized car still running, door hanging open, probably looking like the world's least competent intruder.

Inside, it was warm in that deliberate, Scandinavian way. Not the accidental warmth of a British terraced house in July, but something planned, earned. The wood burner was already set up, which felt almost embarrassingly welcoming, like someone had been expecting me despite my best efforts to arrive incompetently. I kept waiting for the catch. The tap that only runs cold, the mattress with a mystery slope, the wifi password written in a code I could not crack. None came. Just quiet, and space, and windows that framed the trees like someone had actually thought about it.

I made tea badly, because I always make tea badly in new places, using some local milk I was not entirely sure about and a mug I suspect was meant for coffee. Sat on the little veranda thing, still in my driving shoes, watching the light do that long, slow fade it does up here. The panic of the journey, the gate nonsense, the charger, the hot dog - it all felt like it had happened to someone slightly more chaotic than I was prepared to admit I actually am.

That is the trick of places like this, I think. They let you arrive as whatever version of yourself the journey made, then quietly suggest you might leave that version at the door.