The drive from Oslo took the best part of four hours, which in my head had translated to "a pleasant afternoon jaunt" but in reality meant arriving at the Rauland cabin with a numb backside and a mood that could best be described as "brittle." My partner had done the sensible thing and napped. I had done the stubborn thing and insisted I was fine to drive the whole way, which is how I ended up trying to reverse our hire car down a narrow gravel track in near-darkness, convinced I was about to become a local legend for all the wrong reasons.

The mishap, when it came, was almost embarrassingly small. I had been so focused on not clipping the wooden fence posts that I completely failed to notice the low stone wall flanking the parking area. A gentle crunch, a sheepish silence, and then my partner opening one eye to ask if I'd just run over a troll. I hadn't, thankfully. Just my dignity, slightly. The wall was unharmed. The car had a scratch that I mentally filed under "we'll sort that later" alongside several other life admin tasks I was spectacularly avoiding.

But then I stepped out, and something shifted.

The air up here hits you differently. Rauland sits at roughly nine hundred metres in the Hardangervidda plateau region, and the first thing that struck me was the stillness. Not the creepy, horror-film stillness, but a settled, purposeful quiet that made my city-dwelling brain briefly panic before surrendering. No traffic hum. No distant sirens. Just the faint whisper of wind through birch trees and what I later learned was a nearby stream, though in the darkness it sounded more like someone very patiently running a bath in the next valley.

The cabin itself emerged from the gloom as I fumbled with the key box, my phone torch casting wild shadows across the timber cladding. It's one of those traditional Norwegian hytte styles, red-painted with white trim, the sort that looks almost aggressively picturesque in daylight and merely mysterious at night. I half-expected to find a family of gnomes had already moved in and redecorated.

Inside, the smell hit me before the light did. Woodsmoke, pine, that particular dry warmth of a space that's been closed up but not forgotten. The owners had left the heating on low, bless them, and the transition from biting October air to toasty interior felt like being wrapped in a blanket I hadn't realised I needed. I stood in the hallway, still in my coat, just breathing it in.

My partner, now fully awake and mercifully not mentioning the car, wandered through to the living area and made a small sound of approval. The windows, which I hadn't noticed in my torch-waving panic, turned out to be enormous, framing a darkness that would, we discovered at dawn, become a view of lake Totak glimmering below and the kind of rolling, forested hills that make you understand why Norwegians are so annoyingly content.

I made tea with the efficiency of a man who'd been surviving on petrol station coffee for six hours. The kitchen was simple, functional, clearly used by people who actually cook rather than perform for Instagram. Wooden worktops, a proper kettle, a view of more trees. I kept catching myself staring out the window at nothing in particular, my brain apparently deciding that four hours of focused driving had earned it a holiday too.

That first evening, we didn't do much. Unpacked badly, sat on the sofa with our tea, watched the darkness outside become somehow darker. There was no urgency to explore, no checklist of sights to tick off. The mishap with the wall had stripped away any pretence of being competent, organised travellers, and what remained felt genuinely restful. We were just there, slightly scratched car and all, breathing mountain air and wondering why we'd ever thought a city break would have been preferable.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of that stream, or perhaps the wind, or perhaps nothing at all, and woke to light so clear it felt almost theatrical, pouring through those enormous windows and making the lake below look like someone had polished it overnight.