I have never been so grateful for waterproof trousers in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once wore them to a wedding by mistake. The drive from Bergen to our little Hardanger cottage had been all misty fjords and dramatic cliffs, proper Norway-on-a-postcard stuff, until I realised with a sinking feeling that my "carefully packed" bag contained three left wellies and not a single right one. My partner Dave just sighed in that particular way he has, the one that says "I married a liability but at least she's entertaining."

We pulled up to the red wooden cottage in the late afternoon, rain sheeting down like someone upstairs had forgotten to turn the tap off. Before I could even unclip my seatbelt, a figure emerged from the neighbouring boathouse. This was Gunnar, seventy-ish, built like a pine tree, wearing a jumper that had seen better decades. He squinted at our car, then at us, then broke into a grin that suggested he'd already spotted my footwear situation.

"English?" he called out, though it sounded more like a diagnosis than a question.

We admitted it. He nodded slowly, as if this explained everything, and insisted on helping with our bags. Within three minutes he had established that Dave was "too thin for a man" and that I had "the walk of someone who doesn't fish." I chose to take both as compliments.

Gunnar's wife Ingrid appeared with coffee so strong it practically introduced itself. She spoke excellent English, which she attributed to "watching BBC crime dramas and shouting at the screen." They had lived in the neighbouring house for forty-two years, she told us, and had "seen many tourists come and go, mostly going wrong." She said this with evident satisfaction.

The mishap with my wellies became apparent when I attempted to follow Gunnar down to inspect the fjord access path. He stopped, turned, and looked at my mismatched feet with the expression of a man who had finally seen everything. Then he threw back his head and laughed, a sound like gravel in a cement mixer, and disappeared into his shed. He returned with a pair of rubber boots that smelled distinctly of fish and something else I couldn't identify. "My father's," he announced. "Dead now. Feet same size as yours, though he was a better man." I wore them for the rest of the week and felt oddly honoured.

That first evening, we met their grandson Erik, who was visiting from Odda and had strong opinions about everything, delivered at machine-gun pace. He was studying "tourism something" at university and wanted to know if we had Instagram. When I admitted we did, he immediately advised against posting anything. "Too many people already," he said, then proceeded to tell us seventeen different places we absolutely must visit, most of them involving hikes he described as "easy, maybe two hours" that Gunnar later clarified would require proper climbing equipment and possibly a will.

Dinner happened without anyone really planning it. Ingrid produced fish soup, Gunnar produced aquavit from a bottle with no label, and we produced our pathetic packet of biscuits as a feeble contribution. By the third glass, Gunnar was explaining his theory that the British had lost their way as a nation when they stopped making things with their hands. "You had factories," he said, waving his glass dangerously. "Now you have... what? Phone calls?" Dave, who works in IT, made a small noise and studied his soup with great concentration.

I found myself telling them about my grandmother, a woman who had never trusted foreign travel and considered Wales dangerously exotic. Ingrid patted my hand and said, "She was wise. The world is mostly wet and disappointing. But the soup is good here." This seemed to summarise her entire philosophy.

By the time we stumbled back to our cottage, the rain had stopped and the fjord had turned that particular silver-grey that makes you understand why people paint landscapes. My feet smelled of Gunnar's father and something I suspected was cod. Dave was humming a Norwegian folk song that Erik had taught him, badly.

I stood on the little porch and thought about how I'd worried about the journey, the packing, the weather, all the small anxieties that accumulate around any trip. And here I was, slightly drunk on mystery aquavit, wearing a dead man's boots, having been thoroughly insulted and generously fed by strangers who already felt like the most reliable friends I'd made in years. There's something about arriving somewhere and getting it slightly wrong that opens doors the smooth arrivals never find. I had three left wellies and somehow ended up exactly where I needed to be.