I should have known the holiday was off to a classic start when I confidently strode up to what I thought was our hire car in Oslo, clicked the key fob seventeen times with increasing desperation, and only noticed the child seat in the back was the wrong colour when an actual Norwegian family appeared and stared at me with the polite confusion of people who had definitely not rented a Volvo to a man who could not identify his own vehicle. Three rows of cars later, I found ours. Same model, same year, different shade of grey. I am a professional travel writer, apparently.

The drive to Rjukan took about three and a half hours, winding through Telemark's valleys with that particular Norwegian light that makes everything look slightly too beautiful to be real, like someone has cranked the saturation up just half a notch. My partner drove while I navigated, which is to say I periodically announced "oh" and "maybe that one" while she made actual decisions. We passed through small towns where the houses clung to hillsides in primary colours, red and yellow and blue, as if painted by someone who refused to believe Scandinavia should be monochrome.

Rjukan sits in a valley so deep that the sun disappears entirely for months each winter, which I had thought sounded romantic in a brooding, atmospheric way until I mentioned this to the woman at the petrol station in Tinn. She looked at me with the weary patience of someone who had explained this to many optimistic tourists. "You are here in July," she said, which was fair. "The sun, it stays very late. You will not sleep." She was not wrong. At half past eleven that first evening, I stood on the balcony of our cabin watching the sky hold onto a kind of bruised blue-grey, waiting for darkness that never quite committed.

The cabin itself was one of those proper Norwegian holiday homes, all wood and angles and unexpected steps between levels that I immediately forgot existed, nearly breaking my ankle on the way to make tea. But the view. The view down the valley towards the lake, with Gaustatoppen looming in the distance, made every stubbed toe worthwhile. I stood there with my terrible instant coffee and felt genuinely moved, which I promptly ruined by trying to describe this to my partner using the phrase "it's like God's own..." before trailing off because I could not decide what noun completed that sentence acceptably.

Our first morning, we walked into Rjukan proper, a town that wears its industrial history honestly without being precious about it. The Norsk Hydro museum sits there unapologetically, concrete and functional. I had planned to be interested in this, to nod thoughtfully at exhibits about heavy water and the Second World War. Instead I spent twenty minutes in conversation with an elderly man who appeared to be the museum's unofficial greeter, though he claimed no official position. He had worked at the plant for thirty-one years, he told us, and his father before him. "The Germans, they came," he said, with the casualness of someone discussing weather. "We did not like them." He laughed at his own understatement, a dry chuckle that turned into a cough. His name was Arne, and he insisted we see the sun mirrors on the mountainside, the ones installed to reflect actual sunlight down into the shadowed town square. "Very clever," he said, though his tone suggested he found them slightly ridiculous, a technological solution to a problem that could have been solved by, as he put it, "moving the town, maybe."

We found the square later, watched the mirrors doing their slow mechanical tracking, and sat with ice creams from a small shop where the teenage server practiced her English on us with the enthusiasm of someone who rarely got to deploy it. She was from Notodden originally, she volunteered, had moved for the skiing but stayed for reasons she could not quite articulate, shrugging in that particularly Scandinavian way that communicates entire philosophies of acceptance.

That evening, back at the cabin, I attempted to use the outdoor hot tub, which involved a twenty-minute battle with a wood-burning stove that I fundamentally misunderstood. A neighbour, drawn presumably by my increasingly creative swearing in two languages, appeared to demonstrate the proper technique. He was called Erik, retired from something in Oslo, and he stayed for a beer that became two, telling us about the local walking routes with the particular detail of someone who had measured them in boredom and repetition during lockdown winters. "Gaustatoppen," he said, pointing at the mountain that dominated every view, "everyone wants to climb. I have climbed it forty-seven times. I do not know why. It is the same mountain each time."

I liked him enormously. I liked Arne and the petrol station prophet of sleepless summers and the ice cream girl with her ambitious English. Rjukan was not what I expected, which was something more obviously picturesque, more ready for its close-up. Instead it was ordinary and strange at once, a town that had learned to live in shadow and made that its own particular character. I thought about this as I finally got the hot tub to temperature, sat in water that smelled faintly of woodsmoke, and watched the sky refuse to darken properly. I am not someone who learns profound lessons on holiday, and I was not about to start. But I felt, sitting there, a kind of contentment that came from having got something slightly wrong and found it better than the right thing would have been.

The car, when we left, was definitely ours. I checked three times.