The thing about driving to Gautefall is that you genuinely start to believe the sat nav has given up on you entirely. Three hours out of Oslo and the roads narrow to something approaching a generous footpath, winding through pine forests that look like they have been there since the Vikings packed it in. My partner was in charge of navigation, which is always a risk, and somewhere near Nissedal she announced with absolute confidence that we needed to turn left up what I can only describe as a logging track.

I should have questioned it. I did not question it. Ten minutes later we were reversing slowly past a very patient man on a quad bike who looked at us with the particular expression reserved for tourists who have confused "scenic route" with "actual forestry operation." He did not speak. He did not need to speak. His eyebrows said everything.

We found the proper road eventually, and the NOVASOL cabin when we finally reached it was genuinely lovely - all timber and enormous windows looking out towards the Gautefallheia slopes, the sort of place that makes you feel immediately healthier just standing in it. But I am getting ahead of myself, because the real story of that first evening was the people.

The key collection was at a small petrol station a few miles down the road, run by a woman called Inger who appeared to be approximately seventy and was wearing a knitted jumper featuring what I initially thought was an abstract pattern but later realised was a very detailed moose. She handed over the keys with a series of instructions about the cabin's water system that I absolutely did not retain, then paused to ask where we had driven from. When I mentioned the wrong turn, her face lit up with genuine delight.

"Ah, you met Arne on the quad," she said, not a question. "He will tell this for years. Last summer some Germans in a camper van tried the same track. He had to pull them out with the tractor." She said this with the satisfaction of someone who has witnessed a great deal of human folly and found it consistently entertaining.

We stopped for supplies - or rather, my partner did, while I stood outside attempting to look like someone who definitely knew how to operate a Norwegian cabin. A man in wellies and no apparent coat despite the temperature was leaning against the wall, smoking. He nodded at me. I nodded back, which in retrospect was an escalation.

"English?" he asked.

I admitted it.

"Fishing?" he asked.

I admitted we were not.

He considered this for a long moment, exhaled smoke, and said: "Sensible. The trout here, they are too clever. My brother, he fishes. Never catches. Forty years." He said this with enormous pride, as if his brother's failure represented some kind of moral victory. "I tell him, the fish are laughing. He does not believe me. But I have seen them."

I wanted to ask how exactly he had seen fish laughing, but Inger emerged with our bags and the man simply nodded again, returning to his contemplation, and I felt oddly honoured to have been included in his worldview even briefly.

The cabin itself was warm and well-stocked and exactly what we needed after the journey, but it was those small encounters that set the tone for the whole stay. There is something about places like Gautefall - proper places, not polished tourist experiences - where people treat you with a sort of amused tolerance that feels more welcoming than any elaborate hospitality. They are not performing friendliness. They are simply being themselves, and if you happen to be there, you get included in the general narrative of local life.

I thought about that a lot that first evening, sitting by the window with a cup of tea that tasted slightly of the cabin's particular water system, watching the light fade over the heathland. About how much of travel is actually just being slightly incompetent in someone else's everyday environment, and how kind people generally are about it, and how the man with the quad bike was probably still telling someone about the English in the rental car.

We went back to the petrol station twice more during the week, partly for supplies and partly because Inger had started a running commentary on local weather patterns that we felt invested in. She predicted rain with the accuracy of someone who had simply decided what the weather would do and refused to acknowledge alternatives. The jumper changed - reindeer one day, something that might have been a lynx the next. I never did learn the smoking man's name, but I saw him again on our final morning, standing in the same spot, and he raised his hand in what I choose to believe was recognition.

That is the thing about arriving somewhere properly, I think. Not the cabin, though the cabin was grand. Not the views, though the views were spectacular. It is the moment when you stop being a person in a car on a logging track and start being a minor character in someone else's story, the English who took the wrong turn, the ones who did not fish, the ones who kept coming back for more tea and more weather predictions. I would not have had it any other way.