I have to be honest with you about something right from the start: I do not know how to drive on snow. This became painfully obvious somewhere between Oslo and Favang, when I confidently told the hire car woman "oh yes, winter tyres, of course" and then spent the next two hours gripping the steering wheel like it owed me money. The mishap came just outside Ringebu, where I took what I can only describe as an "optimistic" turn into a petrol station and found myself axle-deep in a snowdrift that had looked, to my untrained eye, exactly like a carpark.

A very kind man with a tractor and the patience of a saint pulled me out while his dog watched from the cab with what I can only describe as professional disappointment. I gave him a packet of wine gums I had in the glovebox. He looked at them the way his dog had looked at me. Still, twenty minutes later I was back on the E6, crawling towards Favang at a speed that would embarrass a mobility scooter, arriving at the cabin well after dark with my dignity in tatters and my neck seized up from tension.

The cabin sat at Kvitfjell, which I had booked in a hurry during a January gloom back in Manchester without fully processing what "ski-in ski-out" might mean for someone whose primary winter skill is making tea. In daylight the next morning, the place revealed itself properly: red-painted timber, a proper wood-burning stove, and windows that framed the Gudbrandsdalen valley like a painting I wasn't rich enough to own. I stood there in my socks with a coffee, watching the sun hit the mountain, and felt something in my shoulders finally drop. The tractor man had been right to pity me. I had been driving like a frightened pensioner. But I was here now.

I had planned, in my infinite wisdom, to spend this holiday walking. Not skiing, which the cabin was clearly built for. Walking. Hiking, even. I had packed boots with the seriousness of someone preparing for an expedition, and I had researched trails around Kvitfjell with the earnestness of a man who had never once considered what "alpine conditions" actually meant.

The weather, as it turned out, had plans of its own. The first morning brought crisp blue skies and a temperature that felt almost kind, so I set off towards a trailhead I had spotted near the ski lift base, figuring I would walk up towards the higher ground and see what I could see. Within an hour I was postholing through snow that came to my knees, sweating absurdly, and realising that my "hike" was essentially just very inefficient wading. The views, when I stopped to actually look, were ridiculous: the valley falling away, the peaks of Rondane somewhere in the distance, the whole world reduced to white and blue and the dark green of spruce trees. But my enjoyment was somewhat compromised by the fact that I had forgotten to bring water and was now eating snow like a desperate animal.

I turned back, defeated but strangely cheerful, and spent the afternoon on the cabin's deck with a blanket and a book, watching proper skiers glide past with the effortless grace I would never possess. The weather shifted that evening, the temperature climbing almost unnervingly, and by the next morning the snow had softened to something approaching porridge. I tried another walk, this time lower down towards Favang village, following what I thought was a marked trail and ending up instead in someone's garden, where a woman in a headscarf pointed me back towards the road with the resigned air of someone who had redirected many idiots before me.

The warmth continued. It was not warm by any sensible standard, but by Norwegian winter standards it felt almost tropical, and I found myself in the slightly absurd position of walking in just a fleece while locals still moved about in full ski gear. I explored the trails around the lower slopes of Kvitfjell, where the snow had compacted enough to support my weight without swallowing me whole, and discovered that walking in these conditions had its own particular pleasure: the creak of snow underfoot, the smell of pine resin in air that felt almost too clean to breathe, the sudden silence when the wind dropped and you realised how much noise you normally lived with.

On my third day the weather broke properly, a warm wind coming up the valley that turned the snow heavy and wet, and I made the decision to abandon any pretence of ambitious hiking. Instead I walked the short distance to the Kvitfjell ski area's lower buildings, found a bench with a view, and simply sat. A man about my age joined me, nodding at the mountains, and we sat in the comfortable silence of two people who did not share a language but shared an understanding of when not to speak.

I had come here with plans, with routes mapped and distances calculated, and instead I had spent four days learning to move more slowly, to accept that the weather would do what it wanted, that my walking would be limited to what the conditions allowed rather than what my pride demanded. The snow would not cooperate with my summer-hiking mentality. The mountains did not care about my fitness app. On my final morning I walked one last time along a groomed track near the cabin, the sun warm on my face, my boots sinking only slightly, and I thought about how rarely I allowed myself to do less than I had planned.

The drive back to Oslo was uneventful, which I took as a personal triumph. I stopped at the same petrol station in Ringebu, parked with excessive caution in the exact same spot, and bought a coffee from the machine while the tractor man's dog watched from a nearby farmyard. I raised my cup to him. He did not respond. Some things, I suppose, are beyond forgiveness.