The satnav had other ideas about how to reach our cabin in Oppdal, and by other ideas I mean it tried to send us up what I can only describe as a goat track with delusions of grandeur. We had already been driving for the best part of four hours from Trondheim, winding through the sort of scenery that makes you keep pulling over for photos you will never actually look at again, when the calm robotic voice instructed us to turn left onto something that barely qualified as a path. My partner gave me that look, the one that says I thought you said you had checked the route, and I did what any sensible person would do and blamed Norway.

Twenty minutes of white-knuckle reversing later, we found the proper road and arrived at the cabin as the late afternoon sun was doing that golden thing it does in late spring, the kind of light that makes everything look like a tourism brochure. I stepped out of the car, stretched my legs, and promptly walked into a low wooden beam on the porch. This is how I introduced myself to Oppdal, clutching my forehead and laughing while my partner pretended not to know me.

The cabin sat in a small clearing surrounded by birch trees just beginning to show their leaves, with a view down towards the valley that made the whole satnav fiasco feel like a necessary preamble. Inside smelled of pine and something faintly smoky from the wood-burning stove, and the kitchen window framed the sort of view that estate agents would kill for. I put the kettle on and promptly forgot about it, too busy standing on the small deck with a cup of tea that someone else had made, watching nothing much happen across the hillside.

That first evening set the tone for what became a week of glorious, intentional laziness. We had brought books, proper thick ones that had been sitting on the shelf at home making us feel guilty, and I discovered that reading in a deck chair with the sun warming your legs is an entirely different experience from reading on a commuter train. The cabin had no television, which initially caused a small panic, then a profound relief. I found myself noticing the quality of afternoon light, the particular silence that falls when the wind drops, the way the birch leaves shimmered when it picked up again.

Our explorations rarely extended beyond a few miles, and this was by design rather than limitation. There was a small lake within walking distance where we took sandwiches and watched dragonflies dart across the still water. We found a local farm shop selling brown cheese and jam made from cloudberries, which I bought mostly because the woman running it was so enthusiastic that saying no felt rude. The cheese turned out to be excellent on the cabin's rather elderly toaster waffles, eaten at ten in the morning because we had forgotten to set an alarm and nobody was going to stop us.

On the third day I realised I had not checked my phone in twenty-four hours. This discovery caused not anxiety but a strange, almost giddy lightness. I walked down to the end of the track and back, perhaps a mile in total, and returned feeling as though I had accomplished something significant. The bar for achievement had lowered itself to exactly where I needed it.

The mishap with the satnav became our running joke, mentioned whenever we passed the turning for the goat track. I began to see it as the cabin's way of filtering out anyone in too much of a hurry. Oppdal does not reward rushing, and neither did our little wooden house in the birch trees. By the end of the week I had finished two books, developed a minor obsession with identifying Norwegian birds I would never see again, and achieved what I can only describe as a state of advanced horizontalness. We left on a bright morning, packing slowly, already talking about when we might return. The satnav behaved itself on the way out, which felt almost like a shame.