I have never been so relieved to see a wooden cabin in my entire life. Twelve hours after leaving Luton, having endured a delayed flight to Oslo, a train that smelled faintly of pickled herring, and a hire car with a sat nav that appeared to be having some sort of existential crisis, I finally crested the hill above Hafjell and there it was. Our cabin. Our beautiful, impossibly Scandinavian cabin, perched among pine trees with the Lagen valley stretching out below like a postcard that had got a bit carried away with itself.

The mishap, because there is always a mishap, occurred roughly three minutes after this triumphant arrival. I was so eager to stretch my legs and breathe that mountain air everyone bangs on about that I flung open the car door with theatrical enthusiasm. My phone, which had been balanced on my lap throughout the final winding stretch of road, performed a perfect arc through the crisp Norwegian air and landed with a soft but deeply ominous thud in a snowdrift beside the driveway. I watched it go with that particular slow-motion horror reserved for dropping toast jam-side down or realising you have called your teacher "mum."

I should mention at this point that I am forty-three years old and supposedly capable of basic motor function. My partner, who had been dozing in the passenger seat, opened one eye and said nothing. She did not need to. Her silence was absolutely deafening.

The phone survived, though it took ten minutes of undignified digging with a borrowed shovel and some muttered words that would not have impressed the neighbours, had there been any. There were not. That was rather the point. The cabin sat in glorious isolation, surrounded by nothing but snow-laden spruce and the occasional set of what I chose to believe were elk tracks. The nearest building, a similarly timber-clad affair, sat just visible through the trees perhaps a hundred metres away, close enough for vague neighbourly comfort, distant enough that my phone-related swearing had gone unwitnessed.

The key was exactly where the instructions promised, in a little lockbox that required the sort of code-entry concentration I could barely muster. I fumbled it twice, aware of my partner watching from the warmth of the car, probably wondering if she had committed to a lifetime of this. Third time lucky. The door swung open and the smell hit me immediately, that particular blend of pine, woodsmoke, and something indefinably clean that no air freshener has ever successfully replicated.

I will be honest, I had worried it would feel like a budget ski chalet, all laminated surfaces and furniture that resented your existence. It was not. The living area opened up with proper timber walls, a wood-burning stove that looked like it had been waiting specifically for my incompetence, and windows so large they felt almost impertinent, offering up that valley view as if it were nothing special. The kitchen had actual wooden worktops, not the plasticky approximation I had mentally prepared for, and when I ran the tap the water came out cold enough to make me yelp, which I consider a good sign in mountain accommodation.

My partner had by now joined me, phone safely retrieved and wiped down, and we stood there in our coats like a pair of idiots, too overwhelmed to take them off. The upstairs loft, accessed by a staircase steep enough to qualify as exercise, revealed two bedrooms tucked under the eaves, each with that particular Scandinavian talent for making simplicity feel luxurious. The beds were made with white linen so crisp it practically crackled. I touched one, embarrassingly, just to confirm it was real.

By now the light was fading, that rapid Norwegian dusk that feels less like sunset and more like someone dimming the lights for the second act. We had not planned to do anything ambitious that first evening. The supermarket in Lillehammer, a mere ten minutes down the road, had supplied us with enough provisions to survive a modest siege. But standing in that cabin, watching the last of the daylight turn the snow outside from white to blue to something approaching lavender, I felt that particular holiday feeling that proper travel occasionally grants you. The sense that you have arrived somewhere that does not merely accommodate you but quietly insists you slow down, pay attention, perhaps stop flinging your phone into snowdrifts.

I lit the wood burner with more confidence than I deserved. It caught immediately, because of course it did, everything here functioning with that faintly smug Scandinavian efficiency. My partner produced wine from somewhere and we sat on the sofa, still in our coats if I am honest, because the cabin was warming through but not quite there yet, and we watched the darkness settle over the valley and the first stars appear with an insulting clarity that London had never prepared me for.

That was our first hour at Hafjell. No skiing yet, no exploring, no proper sense of what the week might hold. Just arrival, relief, a small humiliation in a snowdrift, and the growing realisation that sometimes the journey really does make the destination taste sweeter. Though I would still prefer if my phone had not been involved.