I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I tried to fill up the hire car with diesel in Mora and spent a solid five minutes wondering why the nozzle would not fit. Turns out I had pulled up to an ethanol pump. The petrol station attendant, a lovely chap called Lars, found this absolutely hilarious. I found it less so at the time, but looking back, it set the tone perfectly for a week where nothing quite went to plan and everything turned out better for it.

The drive from Mora up to Idre had already been gorgeous. Dalarna in late autumn is basically Sweden showing off. Those red wooden houses with white trim, the ones you see on every postcard, dot the landscape like someone scattered them from a great height. Lakes appear from nowhere, perfectly still and impossibly clear. I kept pulling over to take photos, then realising every bend in the road offered something even more ridiculous.

By the time I reached Idre Pine Hill, I was already running two hours late and had taken at least one wrong turn that led me down a gravel track ending at someone's summer house. A friendly wave from an elderly chap in his garden, and I was reversing back up the track feeling like a proper tourist.

The property itself sits in that perfect sweet spot - secluded enough to feel properly away from it all, but not so remote that you start worrying about horror film scenarios. The key was in a lockbox, which of course I could not open at first because I was entering the code backwards. Standard. But stepping inside, the whole ethanol debacle and the gravel track embarrassment melted away. Huge windows looking out at proper wilderness, that lovely woody smell of a cabin that has seen many happy winters, and a kitchen that actually had decent knives. Holiday rental knives are usually about as effective as a spoon, so this felt like genuine luxury.

I had grand plans for the first evening. Proper plans. A mapped-out walk, dinner at a specific time, maybe an early night to beat the jet lag. Instead, I got lost within twenty minutes of leaving the cabin. The trail I intended to follow somehow forked in a way my map did not acknowledge, and I found myself wandering through birch forest with no particular sense of where the property was.

Here is the thing about getting lost in Dalarna, though. It is almost embarrassingly pleasant. I stumbled across a small lake, barely more than a pond really, that did not appear on any map I later checked. Perfectly still, surrounded by trees just starting to turn, and so quiet I could hear a single bird somewhere across the water doing whatever birds do when they think no one is listening. I sat on a rock for probably half an hour, doing absolutely nothing. I am terrible at doing nothing normally. My phone had no signal, which helped.

Finding my way back took another hour and involved crossing a stream on a fallen log that I absolutely would not have attempted if I had not been slightly worried about ending up on the evening news. I arrived back at the cabin muddy, slightly damp, and grinning like an idiot. Dinner was at ten, involved whatever I could throw together from the slightly random supermarket haul in Mora, and tasted better than most restaurant meals I have had.

That set the pattern for the week. Every planned walk turned into an accidental discovery. The trail to the supposedly famous viewpoint somehow led me instead to a tiny clearing where someone had built a miniature wooden sauna, clearly hand-crafted, sitting there in the forest like a secret. No sign, no explanation, just a small structure with a little stove inside and a view through the trees that the actual viewpoint probably could not match.

I never found the viewpoint, by the way. Went looking three times. Got lost three different ways, found three different unmarked spots that felt like they were mine alone. A rocky outcrop perfect for watching the afternoon light change. A marshy area where the cloudberries had already been picked but the boardwalk through it made me feel like an explorer. A stream pool deep enough for a freezing plunge that I absolutely did take, yelping like a small dog, emerging feeling genuinely alive in a way my normal morning coffee does not quite achieve.

The locals, when I did encounter them, seemed to understand this approach completely. A woman walking her dog near what I thought was a trailhead just nodded when I admitted I had no idea where I was. "Det ar bast sa," she said, which I later learned roughly means "it is best that way." She was not wrong.

By the end of the week, my phone's step count was nonsense, my boots were properly broken in, and I had a collection of spots that existed nowhere official, only in my memory and a few slightly blurred photos taken in that particular light you get up there, clean and sharp and nothing like home.

I left Idre Pine Hill with the key code finally memorised, a slight obsession with Swedish right-of-way laws, and the realisation that my best holidays have always been the ones where the plan fell apart within hours. The ethanol pump, the backwards lockbox code, the vanished viewpoint - they were not mishaps, really. They were the point.