I'd driven the E39 from Trondheim with the kind of misplaced confidence that only comes from having watched one too many Nordic noir box sets. Three hours of fjord views and increasingly questionable road snacks later, I turned onto Froya proper and promptly missed the turning to Kvalvaeroya not once but twice. The third attempt involved a gravel track, a slightly hysterical satnav, and me reversing past a very patient man walking his dog who definitely saw me mouth something unprintable at my own dashboard.

The cottage sat low against the rocks, painted that particular deep red that makes every Norwegian coastal home look faintly smug about its view. I stepped out of the car and immediately discovered my left welly had a leak I'd been ignoring since approximately 2017. Salt water in your sock is a special kind of indignity, especially when you're trying to look like someone who belongs in this landscape rather than someone who's just argued with a Garmin for forty-five minutes.

Inside, the place smelled of pine and something else I couldn't place until I opened the bedroom wardrobe and found a stack of dried fish from the previous summer's catch. The owner had warned me about this in an email I'd skimmed too quickly, something about traditional storage and "authentic island character." I moved them to the utility room with the reverence of someone handling archaeological artefacts, which I suppose in a way they were.

The kitchen window framed the kind of seascape that makes you feel slightly fraudulent as a photographer. I put the kettle on, found the coffee I'd remembered to pack, and stood there in my one dry sock watching a fishing boat cut across the sound. The light was doing that Norwegian thing where everything looks slightly overexposed, as though the world has its brightness setting turned up just one notch too high.

My daughter appeared from the bedroom she'd already claimed, despite us having discussed this democratically in the car. She'd found a deck of cards with a picture of a cod on the back and wanted to know if we were having fish for dinner. I said probably, given our current storage situation, and she looked at me with the particular disappointment of a twelve-year-old who had been hoping for pizza.

We walked down to the shore after lunch, picking our way over rocks that were clearly designed by someone with no regard for human ankles. The beach was proper Nordic wilderness stuff, not sand so much as broken shells and the occasional piece of driftwood that looked like modern art if you squinted. She found a crab shell and insisted on bringing it back, cradling it like a precious gem while I tried not to think about where we'd put it among the drying fish.

That evening I cooked something basic from the supplies we'd brought, because the nearest shop was a drive I wasn't mentally prepared for. We ate at the small table watching the light finally start to fade around half ten, that endless Norwegian dusk that makes you lose all sense of proper bedtime. My daughter had stuck the crab shell on the windowsill where it caught the last of the sun and looked, I'll admit, almost beautiful.

I thought about the drive, the wet sock, the fish in the wardrobe. About how holidays never start the way you imagine, how the mishaps become the stories you actually tell. The leak in my welly had soaked through properly by now, my foot cold and faintly ridiculous. I didn't care. Outside, the sea did its ancient indifferent thing against the rocks, and somewhere a gull made a noise like a complaining hinge.

Tomorrow we'd find the proper beach, maybe try the fishing, definitely buy more coffee. For now, this was enough. A red cottage, a drying fish relocation project, a child with a crab shell, and me with my feet up, finally still, finally here.