I'd driven through More og Romsdal before, but always in a tearing hurry to reach somewhere supposedly more spectacular. This time, with a fortnight booked at a proper Norwegian cabin near Orsta and Volda, I was determined to do things differently. Slow travel, mindful journey, all that business. I even packed a hip flask of decent whisky to celebrate my arrival like a civilised adult.

The drive from Alesund Airport took me along the E39, winding past fjords that looked like they'd been painted by someone showing off. Mountains rising straight from black water, waterfalls catching the low autumn light. I felt rather pleased with myself, to be honest. Too pleased, as it turned out.

I pulled into what I assumed was my cabin's parking area, grabbed my rucksack, and marched up to the door with the confidence of a man who'd definitely double-checked his booking. The key code worked. The door opened. I stepped inside, already reaching for my hip flask, and found myself face to face with a very surprised elderly woman in her dressing gown, holding a mug of something steaming and staring at me with the particular expression reserved for home invaders and lost tourists.

"God ettermiddag?" I offered, which exhausted roughly forty percent of my Norwegian.

She didn't blink. "Du er feil sted." Wrong place. She said it kindly enough, the way you might correct a large dog that's wandered into your kitchen.

I'd mixed up two similarly named properties, you see. Mine was three kilometres further along the valley, tucked behind a small copse of birch trees that I'd somehow driven straight past while admiring my own reflection in the rearview mirror. The whisky stayed firmly in my bag.

When I finally located the correct cabin, I was too flustered to appreciate much beyond the fact that it had four walls and no unexpected pensioners. It wasn't until the following morning, nursing a cup of coffee on the wooden deck, that I properly took in where I actually was. The place sat low in a gentle hollow, surrounded by grassland that rolled down towards the Orstafjorden, with the Sunnmore Alps rising behind like a theatrical backdrop someone had forgotten to tell about restraint.

My first proper conversation came at the local petrol station, where I went to buy milk and emergency dignity. The attendant, a wiry chap called Arne with hands that suggested decades of fishing, took one look at my registration plate and launched into a detailed assessment of British automotive reliability. He'd owned a Triumph once, in the seventies. Terrible machine. Beautiful, but terrible. "Like a woman I knew in Bergen," he said, then laughed so hard at his own joke that he had to lean against the cigarette display.

I spent that first week doing very little beyond walking the immediate shoreline and failing to catch anything from the small jetty near the cabin. The walking was spectacular enough without embellishment. Narrow paths threading between wild blueberry bushes, the occasional sheep staring with that particular judgmental vacancy they cultivate, and everywhere the smell of salt water and pine resin mixing in the cold air.

The jetty became my evening ritual. I'd take a folding chair and sit there with a thermos, watching the light change across the fjord. On my fourth evening, a neighbour appeared from the cabin two hundred metres along the shore. Knut, he introduced himself, carrying a proper fishing rod and the resigned expression of someone who'd watched my incompetence for several days without comment.

"You are sitting wrong," he said, by way of opening. "Also your bait is wrong. Your timing is wrong. The fish, they are laughing at you."

He showed me how to set a lure properly, speaking in the clipped, practical manner of someone who'd rather demonstrate than discuss. His English came in fragments, heavily accented, punctuated by long pauses where he'd stare at the water as if receiving instructions. He'd lived in this valley his entire life, except for two years in Stavanger which he referred to as "the mistake." Too many people. Too much talking. Here, he said, you know who people are because you've known them forever, and they know you, and nobody needs to perform anything.

I thought about that for several days. The performing thing. How much of my own travel had been about collecting experiences to narrate later, rather than simply being somewhere. Knut's wife, Gerd, brought me leftover farikal one evening, lamb and cabbage stew that tasted of something fundamental and unimprovable. She talked more than Knut, mostly about their grandchildren in Molde, but kept steering the conversation back to me with a directness I found disarming. What did I actually do with my days? Not my job, my days. I struggled to answer coherently.

By the second week, I'd become a minor fixture at the small Spar shop in Orsta, where the woman on the till would comment on my purchases with the familiarity of a relative. "More brown cheese? You are becoming Norwegian now. Soon you will complain about the weather correctly." I never learned her name. She wore a brooch shaped like a Viking ship and seemed to find my entire presence faintly amusing.

The hip flask remained largely untouched. What I'd imagined as a solitary, contemplative holiday became something more sociable and less narratable. Conversations that went nowhere in particular. Silence that didn't need filling. A kind of unplanned intimacy with strangers who expected nothing from me beyond basic courtesy and occasional self-deprecation.

On my final morning, I walked back to the petrol station to return Arne's borrowed fishing knife. He wasn't there. The young woman covering his shift said he'd gone to his boat, as he did most days now that the tourist season had thinned. I left the knife with her, along with a note of thanks that felt inadequate even as I wrote it.

Driving back to Alesund, I passed the wrong cabin again. The one with the surprised pensioner. I slowed, half-hoping to wave an apology, but the windows were dark. The whole fortnight suddenly felt like something I'd dreamed, vivid but unverifiable. I still have the note from Arne's shift worker, written in looping Norwegian I can't properly translate. Something about returning, I think. Or perhaps about not needing to. I keep it in the glove compartment, where I see it occasionally and remember that I went somewhere and was, for a brief while, someone slightly different from whoever I'd been performing before.