I have never been so relieved to see a wooden shed in my entire life. After a three-hour drive from Bergen that included one wrong turn, a near-miss with a sheep who clearly owned the road, and my youngest being spectacularly sick into a carrier bag somewhere near the Eikelandsosen junction, the Holsnoy cottage finally appeared through the drizzle like a promise I was not sure anyone intended to keep.

The journey had started with such misplaced confidence. I had packed the car the night before, smugly ticking off thermal layers and waterproofs while my wife raised an eyebrow at my insistence that we would not need the sat nav. "I have got this," I told her, tapping my temple. "Norwegian roads are basically just one big loop round a fjord." Reader, they are not. They are a vindictive spaghetti of tunnels and bridges designed by someone who fundamentally distrusts straight lines.

The mishap, though. I need to tell you about the mishap. We stopped at a petrol station just past Os for coffee and what the Norwegians call "matpakke" supplies. I was feeling quite pleased with myself for successfully ordering three coffees using my phrasebook Norwegian. Then, returning to the car with my hands full of cardboard cups and a packet of something I thought was ham but may have been herring, I managed to trip over absolutely nothing. The coffees went one way, the herring-ham went another, and I performed an involuntary interpretive dance that ended with me sat in a puddle that was deeper than it looked. A local man watched this entire performance without changing expression, then got into his Volvo and drove away. I have never felt more British.

By the time we reached the cottage, I was damp, humiliated, and carrying the faint aroma of petrol station coffee mixed with whatever I had sat in. The kids were asleep. My wife was maintaining a diplomatic silence that spoke volumes. And then we turned onto the gravel track, and there it was: red wooden walls, white trim, a little terrace facing out towards the Hardangerfjord with mountains rising behind it like they had been painted there specifically to make me feel better about my ruined trousers.

The key was in the lockbox, which I opened with shaking hands. Inside, the cottage smelled of pine and something faintly maritime, that particular scent of a place that spends most of its year waiting for people to arrive. The living room had one of those wood-burning stoves that looks like it belongs in a brochure, and windows that framed the fjord so perfectly I actually laughed. It was the laugh of someone who has been mildly traumatised and is now being unexpectedly rewarded.

My wife started unpacking while I stood on the terrace, still in my damp trousers, watching a ferry make its slow crossing in the distance. The kids woke up, confused but mercifully no longer nauseous, and immediately began arguing about who got which bedroom. I did not care. I was watching the light change on the water, something I had not done in approximately fifteen years of adulthood, and realising that this was exactly what we had come for.

That evening, we walked the few hundred metres down to the small jetty near the cottage, the kids throwing stones into water so clear you could see the kelp swaying beneath. We did not do anything remarkable. We ate pasta from the pan because someone had forgotten proper plates. We sat in the fading light while my daughter asked approximately four hundred questions about whether fjords have sharks. We were too tired for board games, too tired for proper conversation even. But when I finally crawled into bed, listening to the unfamiliar quiet of a place without traffic or neighbours or any of the usual urban static, I felt something loosen in my chest that I had not known was tight.

The trousers never fully recovered, by the way. They sit in my wardrobe now, a permanent reminder that humility arrives in many forms, and sometimes it is carrying three coffees and a packet of suspicious herring.