I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's private garden. Fourteen hours after leaving Manchester, including a ferry crossing where I ate my own body weight in pastries, I finally rolled into Blekinge with the sort of exhaustion that makes you forget your own postcode. Holmsjoe sat there waiting, all red timber and sensible Swedish calm, while I attempted to reverse a hire car up a gravel drive that suddenly felt narrower than a supermarket aisle.

The mishap, then. I'd stopped at a petrol station near Karlskrona to buy supplies, feeling terribly organised with my reusable bag and phrasebook Swedish. I filled the boot with what I thought was sensible holiday fare: crispbread, cheese, something called "fiskbullar" that I later discovered was fish balls in a tin. What I did not notice, in my delirious state, was that the bottom of my carrier bag had developed a slow, dignified split. I walked the fifty metres to the car leaving a breadcrumb trail of groceries behind me. A very polite teenager tapped me on the shoulder holding my dropped tin of herring, and I had one of those moments where you realise you've become the sort of British person abroad that you normally laugh at on television.

By the time I actually reached the property, I was ready to weep with relief. The owners had left the key in a sensible little lockbox, no faffing about, and I pushed open the door to that particular hush that only wooden houses seem to have. The first thing that struck me was the smell: pine, faintly, and something else that took me a moment to place. Old books, perhaps, or just the accumulated contentment of other people's holidays. The living room stretched out with enormous windows facing the water, and I stood there in my motorway-stiff clothes watching the light do something extraordinary across the archipelago.

I had intended to unpack immediately, to establish order, to be the sort of person who hangs clothes in wardrobes rather than living from a suitcase. Instead I found myself on the wooden deck with a cup of tea made from a bag I'd fished from the glove compartment, watching a heron stand in the shallows with the patience of someone who has never once worried about motorway service stations. The house had a sauna, I noticed, and a rowing boat tied to a small jetty, and suddenly all those hours of driving seemed not just worthwhile but almost necessary, as if I'd had to earn this particular quiet.

The kitchen was simple and actually equipped with sharp knives, which is rarer in holiday lets than you might imagine. I made a terrible dinner from my diminished supplies, sitting at the table with the window open to the water. Somewhere out there Karlskrona proper sat with its naval history and its handsome squares, but I felt no urgency. The mishap with the groceries, the sat nav's garden-based route suggestions, my own ridiculous tiredness, all of it seemed to belong to a different person now, one still stuck on a ferry somewhere in the Kattegat.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of water moving against the rocks, which is not something that happens in my terraced house in Stockport, and woke to mist lying low over the inlet like something from a film I would normally avoid for being too picturesque. I still had no proper food. I still had no plan. But standing on that deck in my pyjamas, watching the morning happen to someone else's beautiful corner of Sweden, I felt something shift, the way holidays sometimes let you, if you're lucky and sufficiently exhausted, become a slightly better version of yourself.