I have never been so relieved to see a red wooden house in my entire life. Twelve hours after leaving Luton, having navigated two flights, a train to Karlskrona, and a hire car that smelled faintly of fish, I finally pulled up to our holiday let in Holmsjo. That is when I discovered I had been sitting on the sat nav for the last twenty minutes and it had been cheerfully recalculating a route to somewhere near Gothenburg.

The mishap was entirely my fault, of course. I had shoved it under my thigh during a frantic search for chewing gum and promptly forgotten about it. My partner gave me that particular look, the one that says "I love you but please never do this again," while I performed the dignified dance of trying to extract a warm Garmin from beneath myself without tipping out of the driver's seat. A neighbour walking past with a wheelbarrow pretended not to notice. Swedish politeness is a remarkable thing.

But then I actually looked at where we were, and the sat nav embarrassment melted away like the last of the snow. The house sat among birch trees, painted that deep Falun red that seems to glow against the pale northern sky. A proper wooden deck wrapped around one side, and I could hear water somewhere close by, that soft lapping sound that makes your shoulders drop without you even realising. The air smelled of pine and woodsmoke and something else I could not place, something clean and cold that I eventually decided was simply "not Luton."

The key was in the lockbox exactly where the instructions said, which felt almost suspicious after years of British holiday lets where you spend twenty minutes searching for a key hidden inside a fake rock that has clearly been stolen. Inside, the house smelled of timber and faintly of the coffee the previous guests had considerately left in a jar. I am still thinking about those strangers and their kindness. The main room was simple and uncluttered, wooden floors that creaked in friendly places, and windows that framed the trees like deliberate paintings. Someone had thought about where to put this house, about what you would want to see while eating breakfast.

I made the mistake of claiming the bedroom nearest the lake before properly investigating, only to discover my partner had already done the same mental calculation and was standing in the doorway with her bag. We did the mature thing and flipped a krona coin I found in the hire car. I lost. The other room was perfectly lovely, obviously, with the same clean lines and that particular Scandinavian talent for making sparse feel cosy rather than empty. I told myself the view of the birch grove was superior anyway. I am still telling myself this.

By the time we had unpacked, or rather by the time I had unpacked while my partner sat on the deck with a cup of that inherited coffee, the light was doing that long golden thing it does at Swedish latitudes. Everything looked slightly unreal, too vivid, as if someone had adjusted the saturation. We walked down to the water's edge, me still in my airport socks with a hole in the toe, and stood there like proper tourists saying "look at this" and "can you believe this" back and forth until it became embarrassing even to us.

That first evening, we did almost nothing. Ate bread and cheese from a supermarket in Karlskrona, drank wine that tasted better than it probably was, watched the light finally fade around half past ten. I kept expecting to feel restless, to need entertainment or distraction, but something about the stillness was contagious. Even the sat nav, now safely on a shelf, seemed to have given up judging me.

I fell asleep that night with the window cracked, listening to what I later learned were probably owls, and woke once in the small hours to find the sky still not fully dark, that strange blue twilight that makes Sweden feel like a place operating on slightly different rules to the rest of the world. My first thought was that I had left the bathroom light on. My second was that I had absolutely no idea what time it was, and that this did not matter in the slightest.

That is the thing about arriving somewhere properly peaceful. The mishaps do not disappear, but they shrink to their proper size, become stories rather than disasters. I still have that sat nav. It still occasionally suggests impossible routes, and I still think of Holmsjo every time it does, that particular combination of mortification and unexpected grace that seems to me now like the whole point of going anywhere new.