I should have known the holiday proper started the moment I tried to unlock the wrong cabin. There we were, me and my partner, standing in the drizzle at half past nine at night, jiggling a key that absolutely refused to turn, while a very patient Norwegian dog observed us from the neighbouring window with what I can only describe as polite concern. Turns out the actual Hol I Tjeldsund was fifty metres further down the gravel track, hidden behind a bend we had both somehow missed despite it being the only bend for miles. We trudged over, laughed until our sides hurt, and promptly decided this set the tone perfectly.

The journey up from Evenes had already been its own gentle adventure. The E10 unwinds like a ribbon someone dropped across the mountains, and I had insisted on driving so I could feel properly intrepid. This lasted approximately forty minutes before I pulled over at what I thought was a scenic viewpoint, only to discover it was actually a lay-by for a fish-drying rack. The smell was astonishing. Educational, certainly, but astonishing. We drove on with the windows down regardless, because the light at that latitude does something strange to your sense of urgency. Everything slows. Everything feels possible.

Arriving at the proper cabin finally, the first thing that struck me was the silence. Not the absence-of-noise sort, but the particular hush of a place where human sounds are visitors rather than residents. The fjord lay maybe two hundred metres below, visible as a dark shimmer between the trees, and somewhere out there a fish jumped with a sound like someone dropping a pebble into a very large bucket. My partner immediately declared we would live here forever. I immediately declared I needed a cup of tea before any major life decisions.

Morning brought the real discovery. We had planned, in that vague way you do on holiday, to drive somewhere notable. Instead we wandered down a path that seemed to lead toward the water, found it petered out into boggy ground, and kept going anyway because the midges had not yet found us and the sun had. What we stumbled into was a tiny cove, barely twenty metres of shingle, where someone long ago had built a rough slipway for boats now rotted to nothing. A single oar lay against a rock, bleached silver and half-buried in moss. We sat there for two hours watching a heron fish with more patience than I have ever possessed for anything. No one came. No path led there on any map we later found.

That became our method, entirely by accident and entirely against my usual nature. I am a planner, a list-maker, someone who researches opening hours. Here, the best moments kept arriving precisely because we abandoned the plan. A gravel track that looked promising delivered us to a clearing where wild raspberries grew in such profusion we ate until our fingers stained purple and our dignity dissolved entirely. Another wrong turn, this one genuinely lost, found us at a farm where an elderly woman was selling goat cheese from her kitchen window. She spoke no English, we spoke barely any Norwegian, and the transaction involved a great deal of pointing and mutual delight. The cheese was extraordinary. We ate it on bread from the supermarket in Evenskjer, sitting on a rock whose location I could never find again if you paid me.

The cabin itself became part of this accidental philosophy. We had booked it for the fjord views, the proper kitchen, the promise of comfort after days of adventure. What we used most was the small deck where we sat with morning coffee watching the weather arrive from the west, and the tiny shed out back where previous guests had left a collection of fishing tackle that looked older than I was. One afternoon I attempted to use it. I caught nothing, tangled everything, and spent twenty minutes extracting a hook from my own sleeve while my partner took photographs she still brings out at dinner parties.

By the end of the week I understood something I had not expected. Getting lost is not a failure of navigation but a different kind of arrival. The places you find without meaning to, the coves and clearings and kitchen-window cheese transactions, they belong to you differently. They have no reviews, no recommended visiting times, no car park. They simply exist, and for a moment, so do you, in a relationship that feels almost private.

We left the key in the proper lock this time, walked to the car in the same drizzle we had arrived in, and drove away without a single photograph of any famous view. I have never been more pleased with a holiday in my life.