I'd packed my thermals, my sensible boots, and enough wool to knit a second jumper. What I hadn't packed, in my infinite wisdom, was the actual address of the cabin. Somewhere between Oslo Airport and the hire car desk, my phone had decided that "Nordseter" was a sufficient destination and my brain, fogged by a 6am departure and airport coffee, had agreed. Three hours of driving through Oppland's autumn tapestry - all burnished golds and stubborn greens clinging to the hills - and I found myself in a car park next to what I later learned was the Sjusjoen ski stadium, squinting at a map that refused to load.

The comedy of it was almost too perfect. There I was, middle-aged and supposedly competent, doing slow laps of a Nordic ski arena in a Vauxhall Corsa while serious-looking Norwegians in proper outdoor kit glided past on roller skis. The seasonal transition was everywhere - summer's green surrendering, winter's white still holding back, and me caught in that awkward in-between, neither prepared nor dressed for either.

September in this part of Norway is a peculiar beast. The tourist brochures don't quite capture it. They show pristine snow or midnight sun, never the damp reality of a landscape exhaling after summer, everything slightly sodden and expectant. The birch trees had started their annual firework display, leaves pooling in every hollow, and the air carried that particular scent of decay and renewal that makes you simultaneously melancholic and alive.

I eventually found the cabin by the gloriously analogue method of asking at the Nordseter Fjellstue, the old mountain hotel whose staff have presumably directed lost Britons since before phones existed. The woman behind the counter didn't even blink. "NovaSol cabin?" she asked, handing me a hand-drawn map. "Third left, past the turning that looks like a driveway but isn't." Norwegian directions, I was learning, rely heavily on things that masquerade as other things.

The cabin itself sat in that transitional state too. The owner had clearly prepared for winter's arrival - firewood stacked with geometric precision, the terrace furniture turned against the weather - but summer's ghost lingered in the remaining geraniums, valiantly red against the greying deck. I stepped inside to that particular silence of wooden buildings in shoulder season, neither fully inhabited nor properly closed up, the air holding traces of last winter's fires and this summer's guests.

What struck me most, that first evening, was how the season dictated everything. The light faded early and without apology, pushing me indoors by seven despite my London-conditioned body clock. The temperature dropped with the sun, proper cold now, not the performative chill of a British autumn. I found myself doing seasonal maths - was this firewood for atmosphere or necessity? Would the morning frost be decorative or treacherous?

I built a fire with the enthusiasm of someone who'd seen it done in films, using approximately three times the necessary kindling and achieving something between a blaze and a smoke signal. Sat there, slightly singed, watching darkness claim the valley, I felt the particular humility that comes from recognising your own smallness against a landscape's indifference to your convenience.

The mishap of my arrival, the seasonal disorientation, the fire-building incompetence - they all felt of a piece. September here doesn't perform for visitors. It simply is, in all its damp, beautiful, unpredictable honesty, and your job is to catch up or go home.