I have never been so relieved to see a wooden cabin in my life, and that includes the time I got caught in a hailstorm near Aviemore and had to shelter in a bothy with what I later discovered was a very angry stoat.

The ferry from Bergen dropped me at Sveio after what the locals cheerfully call a "brisk crossing," which I now understand is Norwegian for "I hope you enjoyed your breakfast because it is currently somewhere over the North Sea." I had spent the entire journey gripping a plastic seat and rehearsing my apologies to the poor woman whose raincoat I had accidentally clutched during one particularly enthusiastic swell. She was lovely about it, actually. Told me she had once seen a German tourist lose his entire wheelie suitcase off the stern during a storm in 1987. "It floated like a duck," she said, with the satisfied air of someone who had witnessed something properly memorable.

My hire car was waiting, a cheerful red thing with suspiciously bald tyres and a smell of fish that no amount of open-window driving could shift. I had directions to the cabin written on a Post-it note that had survived the ferry in my shirt pocket, though the ink had run somewhat, leaving me to interpret "left at the red barn" as best I could. There are, I discovered, a surprising number of red barns in Hordaland. I took three wrong turns and found myself once in someone's driveway, where an elderly man emerged from a shed carrying what I initially thought was a small sword but turned out to be an unusually aggressive herring knife.

"Lost?" he asked, which seemed generous given that I was technically trespassing.

"Holiday cottage," I said, waving my soggy Post-it like a white flag.

He squinted at it, turned it upside down, and laughed. "Ah, Ingrid's place. You went past the co-op. Everyone does. They moved it in 2003 and the satnavs never caught up." He gave me directions that involved two more red barns, a bridge that "only floods in the interesting months," and a final instruction to "look for the goat that thinks it's a dog." I did not ask for clarification. I have learned that some things are better experienced.

The goat, as it happened, was precisely where promised. It trotted up to my car with the confident swagger of a creature that had never once doubted its place in the world, and followed me the final hundred metres to the cabin, occasionally headbutting my tyre in what I chose to interpret as encouragement.

Ingrid herself appeared from behind the cabin, wiping her hands on a tea towel and looking utterly unsurprised by my entourage. "That's Knut," she said, nodding at the goat. "He was raised by a border collie. We don't talk about it." She said this with the straight face of someone who had explained this many times before, and I found myself nodding as if this were completely ordinary, which in that moment it somehow was.

The cabin was everything the website had promised and nothing like I had imagined. The wood stove dominated the main room like a friendly beast, and Ingrid showed me how to coax it into life with a particular arrangement of birch logs that she demonstrated three times while I nodded earnestly and immediately forgot everything. "You'll work it out," she said, with the confidence of someone who had seen worse. "Last week a man from Leeds tried to light it with cooking oil. We had words."

She left me with a loaf of bread she had baked that morning, some butter from the farm up the road, and a jar of something red that she described as "not jam exactly, but you'll want it on everything." The goat remained, staring at me through the window with what I can only describe as pastoral judgment.

I sat at the small wooden table as the light faded, the stove finally crackling into reluctant life, and ate bread that tasted of something I could not name. Outside, Knut lost interest and wandered off, presumably to terrorise another lost tourist. I thought about the woman on the ferry, the man with his herring knife, Ingrid's complete absence of surprise at anything the world might offer her. I had arrived expecting scenery and found something better, though I could not yet say what. The bread, perhaps. The absurdity of the goat. The particular quality of light on water that makes you feel briefly, foolishly, that you understand something important about your own small life.

The stove popped and settled. I buttered another slice, and waited for whatever would happen next.