I have never been so relieved to see a ferry timetable in my entire life. After driving from Bergen through what felt like an endless series of tunnels and bridges, my partner and I finally reached the Reksteren ferry terminal only to realise I had somehow confused the summer and winter schedules. We sat in the car for forty minutes, me pretending to admire the view while quietly dying inside, watching seagulls argue over a fish head. Classic start to a Norwegian holiday.

The crossing itself took about twelve minutes, just long enough for me to make a cup of tea from our thermos and for my partner to stop giving me that look. Reksteren island appeared gradually through the mist, all low hills and dark pine forest pressing right down to the waterline. I had expected something dramatic and fjord-like, but this was gentler, softer somehow. More like the Lake District had a Scandinavian cousin.

Finding the cottage meant navigating a single-track road that wound past a handful of red-painted boathouses and the occasional sheep that seemed personally offended by our presence. The sat-nav gave up entirely about halfway, leaving us to follow hand-painted signs pointing toward various summer houses. My partner drove while I leaned out the window like a golden retriever, squinting at postboxes.

When we finally found it, tucked on a slight rise with a view down toward the water, I actually laughed. Not at the place itself, which was charming in that practical Nordic way, but at the sheer absurdity of getting there. The cottage sat there in traditional red and white, looking utterly unbothered by our delayed arrival, as if it had been waiting patiently for decades and could wait a few minutes more.

The key was exactly where the instructions said, which felt like a small miracle given my organisational track record that day. Stepping inside, the first thing that hit me was the smell of pine and something else, something clean and cold that I later realised was simply Norwegian air that had settled into the wooden walls. The living area had that classic hytte feel, not fancy but everything in its right place, with windows framing slices of the fjord like deliberate paintings.

I immediately made for the terrace, drawn by that water view. The afternoon light was doing that particular Hordaland thing where everything turns slightly golden and unreal. Small boats moved slowly across the channel, and somewhere distant I could hear a dog barking, the sound carrying clearly across the still water. My partner appeared with two cups of coffee, and we stood there in silence, both of us slightly stunned by the quiet.

That first evening, we walked down to the shoreline near the cottage, picking our way over smooth rocks that had clearly been shaped by glaciers and time. The water was cold enough to make me yelp when I tested it, which my partner found hilarious. We found a spot to sit and watched the light fade, neither of us saying much, both of us aware that something had shifted. The stress of the journey, my timetable blunder, the sheep confrontation, all of it had dissolved into something simpler.

I kept thinking about how I had nearly let my own disorganisation spoil this, how I had spent that first forty minutes of waiting in a state of low-grade panic rather than simply looking around me. The ferry had come eventually, as ferries do. The cottage had been here all along. I suppose that is the thing about travelling, the bit I always forget: the mishaps become the stories, and the waiting becomes part of the arrival.

By the time we headed back up to the cottage, the sky had turned that particular deep blue that only happens in northern latitudes, and somewhere across the water a light came on in another house, small and warm and impossibly distant. I was already plotting excuses to stay another day, or another week, or possibly just until I got the ferry timetable permanently tattooed on my arm.