I have never been brilliant with ferries, which is unfortunate when you are trying to reach a holiday cottage in More og Romsdal. The plan was simple enough: fly to Alesund, collect the hire car, catch the ferry from Solevag to Hareid, then potter down through the islands to Volda. What actually happened involved me misreading the timetable by a full hour, arriving at the quay to watch our intended boat shrinking into the distance, and spending forty minutes in a windswept car park eating a squashed sandwich from a petrol station while my other half sat in stony silence.

By the time we reached the cottage, I was fully prepared for disaster. The sat nav had taken us down a track so narrow that I folded the wing mirrors in, and a sheep had stared at me with what I can only describe as professional disappointment. But then we rounded the final bend, and there it was: a proper red wooden cottage perched above the fjord, with mountains rising straight up behind it and that particular stillness that makes you realise how much noise you normally live with.

The key was in the lockbox, which I fumbled with for longer than I care to admit, convinced I had forgotten the code. When the door finally gave way, the smell hit me first - that clean, woody scent of a place that has been properly aired, not the damp fug I had secretly feared. The living room was simple and uncluttered, with big windows framing the water like a painting someone had hung especially for us. I stood there with my rucksack still on, dripping slightly from a rain shower that had caught us between car and door, and felt something in my chest unclench.

The kitchen was compact but sensibly arranged, the kind where everything has a logical home. I opened a cupboard and found coffee, actual decent coffee, not the dusty instant I had packed as backup. My other half had wandered upstairs and called down that the bedrooms had "proper fjord views," by which she meant you could lie in bed and watch the light change on the water. I chose to interpret her enthusiasm as forgiveness for the ferry debacle.

What struck me most, wandering around in those first few minutes, was how the cottage managed to feel both cared-for and unpretentious. The furniture was sturdy rather than stylish, the kind of pieces that have absorbed years of holidays without fuss. A small wood-burning stove sat in the corner, ready for evenings when the Norwegian summer remembers it is technically still Norway. On the terrace outside, two weathered chairs faced the water with the patience of old dogs.

I made us both coffee and we sat there in our coats, because we had not quite worked out the heating yet and because it did not really matter. A heron lifted off from the shoreline below. Somewhere across the fjord, a small boat puttered past, leaving a wake that took an age to settle. I thought about how close I had come to letting one missed ferry colour the whole trip, how quickly I default to expecting things to go wrong. The cottage did not care about my anxieties. It simply existed, solid and warm and quietly spectacular, waiting for us to catch up.

The heating came on eventually. So did the kettle, again. We stayed on that terrace until the light started to fade, neither of us saying much, both of us already knowing we had got something right.