I have never been so grateful for a cup of tea in my entire life. Four hours after leaving Bergen airport, two ferry crossings, one wrong turn that took us up a farm track with increasingly alarmed sheep, and a spectacular argument with the sat nav that ended with me threatening to throw it into a fjord, we finally found the turning for our Hardanger holiday cottage. I had insisted on driving. My wife had insisted I was too tired to drive. Reader, she was right. But we were here, and that was what mattered. Mostly.

The mishap, because there is always a mishap with us, came during the second ferry. I had popped to the toilet, leaving my wife in charge of the car. When I returned, she was chatting to a lovely Norwegian couple about hiking routes, completely failing to notice that the ferry had docked and vehicles were moving. The announcement came in Norwegian, then English, then what I can only assume was increasingly desperate Norwegian again. I sprinted down the stairs like a man whose trousers were on fire, which they very nearly were after that toilet's aggressive hand dryer, and reversed our hire car off the ferry with the grace of a startled hippo. The deckhand's expression suggested this was not the first time he had witnessed British incompetence, merely the most recent.

But then we turned onto the lane leading to the cottage, and something shifted. The Hardangerfjord opened up before us, that impossible blue-green that photographs never quite capture, and the mountains rose on either side like shoulders shrugging against the sky. Our cottage sat perched above the water, a traditional wooden place with that deep red paint they seem to use everywhere in Norway, and suddenly the ferry fiasco felt like it had happened to someone else. Probably someone less sweaty.

The key was in the lockbox as promised, though getting it out required the dexterity of a surgeon and the patience of a saint. I possessed neither, but after ten minutes of muttering and dropping the code sheet in a puddle, we were in. The smell hit first - that particular scent of old wood and something clean, like pine and fresh air had collaborated on a fragrance. My daughter immediately claimed the bedroom with the bunk beds, despite being fourteen and technically too old for such excitement. My son disappeared to investigate the garden, which sloped down towards the water with a sort of reckless Norwegian abandon. No fence, just grass and then fjord. Very trusting, these Norwegians.

I made that cup of tea with the dedication of a religious ritual, standing at the kitchen window watching a small boat putter past. The kettle took ages, because Norwegian electricity runs on fjord time apparently, but I did not care. My wife unpacked with the efficiency of someone who had been trapped in a car with me for too long, and gradually the cottage became ours. The worn sofa, the slightly wonky dining table, the bookshelf full of Scandinavian crime novels we would never read - all of it felt immediately right.

That first evening, we walked down to the water's edge in the long Norwegian light, the kind that lingers past ten o'clock and makes you feel like time has loosened its grip. My son threw stones with the intense seriousness boys bring to such tasks. My daughter took photographs she would later describe as "aesthetic" without apparent irony. My wife and I stood slightly apart, not touching, just breathing the same cold, clean air, and I thought about how we had nearly not come, how work and money and the general exhaustion of modern life had almost kept us home. The sheep on that wrong turn had looked at me with something like pity. They need not have bothered. I had plenty of my own.

We cooked simple food that night - pasta, nothing ambitious, the Norwegian shops having defeated my aspirations towards local cuisine - and ate looking out at the fjord as the light finally, reluctantly, faded. Someone, probably my wife, suggested a game of cards. Someone else, definitely me, suggested an early night. We compromised on both, briefly, before surrendering to the deep sleep that comes from fjord air and ferry adrenaline and the particular peace of being somewhere that demands nothing from you.

I woke once in the night, disoriented, and stood at the window watching the water. A light moved across it, slow and steady, and I imagined who might be out there at that hour, what purpose could be urgent enough for such darkness. Then I remembered that in Norway, in summer, darkness is merely a suggestion, a brief negotiation between day and day. I climbed back into bed, my wife warm and solid beside me, and thought how strange it was that getting lost, nearly missing ferries, arguing with technology and each other, could lead precisely here. The mishaps were the journey, I supposed. Or perhaps I was too tired for philosophy. Either way, the morning would bring more tea, more fjord, more of this particular, precious nothing-much-at-all.