I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I got my left and right mixed up on the E136 and ended up in a layby staring at a very patient moose. Three hours of driving from Oslo, a spectacular fjord or two, and there I was, arguing with a sat nav that insisted Bjorli was "just ahead" while I contemplated sharing my packed lunch with local wildlife.

The property itself, when I finally found it, was one of those classic Norwegian wooden cabins that looks like it was built by someone who really understood winters. Red paint, white trim, the whole hygge fantasy. I was still patting myself on the back for arriving when I discovered I'd packed someone else's suitcase. Not my finest moment. Two weeks of my sister's clothes and a hairdryer that looked like it belonged in a museum. The letting agency chap, a wiry fellow called Arne with eyebrows like angry caterpillars, found this absolutely hilarious. "You will be very warm in the wool, yes?" he said, watching me hold up a floral dress meant for a woman half my height. He lent me a proper coat and spent twenty minutes explaining the wood burner as if it were nuclear engineering. "Not too much birch," he kept saying, waggling a finger. "She will scream at you."

The screaming stove became a running joke with the neighbours. I'd barely got a fire going when a face appeared at the window - not a horror film face, thankfully, but a round, ruddy one belonging to Ingrid from two doors down. She'd brought me a jar of something brown and mysterious, which turned out to be cloudberry jam. "You look like you need feeding," she announced, which I chose to take kindly. Within minutes she was inside, rearranging my kitchen drawers and telling me about her husband's bad knee, her daughter's divorce, and the time a Swedish tourist tried to ski off the roof of the local shop. "Not a clever people, the Swedes," she said, with the confidence of someone who'd never met one.

The local shop, it transpired, was the social hub of Bjorli. Not large. Not modern. But staffed by a teenager called Magnus who spoke English like he'd learned it exclusively from American wrestling programmes. "Bro," he said, when I bought milk and attempted some basic Norwegian. "Your accent is whack." He then spent ten minutes teaching me to say "where is the toilet" without accidentally declaring war on Denmark. An older gentleman in a felt hat, who'd been pretending to browse tinned fish, finally intervened. "The boy is wrong," he said, gravely. "Your accent is not whack. It is merely unfortunate."

I spent more evenings than planned in that shop, or rather in the cramped seating area where coffee was free if you bought something overpriced. There was Gunnar, who claimed to have been a competitive woodchopper until "the incident," which he never elaborated on. There was elderly Solveig, who knitted furiously and offered opinions on everyone who entered. "That one owes me money," she'd whisper, needles clicking. "That one has a lovely bottom." No filter whatsoever. I found myself telling them about the suitcase mix-up on day three, and by day four three different people had offered me spare trousers.

The wood burner did scream at me, by the way. Arne was right. I got overexcited with the birch on my first solo attempt, and the thing made a noise like a dying tuba. Ingrid appeared at the window again, somehow always knowing. "She is angry," she said, without surprise, and came in to demonstrate proper fire management while telling me about her first husband, who apparently couldn't boil water without emergency services.

By the end of the first week, I had borrowed clothes, borrowed stories, and a borrowed sense of belonging I hadn't expected. The moose in the layby felt like another life. The floral dress stayed in the case, unworn, a reminder that the best holidays are the ones where plans go slightly wrong and strangers become briefly, wonderfully, family.