I'd never been to Oeland before, and my first introduction to the island involved me trying to pronounce "Faerjestaden" to a petrol station attendant in Kalmar. I gave it my best shot, something like "Fair-yesta-den," and he looked at me with the polite confusion of a man who'd just been asked directions to Narnia. Turns out it's closer to "Fair-yea-staden," though I'm still not entirely convinced I nailed it on the return journey either.

The bridge from Kalmar is a proper spectacle, six kilometres of road stretching across to the island like someone couldn't be bothered finishing the job properly and just left it there. I'd been driving since five that morning, surviving on service station coffee and an aggressive playlist, and the late afternoon sun was doing that golden thing across the water that makes you feel like you're in a car advert. I may have got slightly emotional. I blame the caffeine and sleep deprivation.

My holiday home was one of those traditional Swedish cottages, red wooden cladding, white trim, the whole charming shebang. The key was in a lockbox, which should have been straightforward. It wasn't. I spent a good ten minutes jabbing at the thing, convinced I'd been sent the wrong code, before realising I was trying to open the neighbour's box. Theirs was number twelve. Mine was fourteen. The numbers were, in my defence, quite small, and I was quite tired. I did a sort of panicked sideways shuffle when I figured it out, hoping no one had spotted me through their window. Someone definitely had.

The cottage itself was immediately lovely in that understated Scandinavian way. Proper little kitchen, a deck out back, and beds that looked like they'd actually been designed for human spines rather than medieval torture. I dumped my bags, opened a beer I'd picked up in Kalmar, and sat on that deck as the light went soft and pink across the garden. Somewhere nearby, a lawnmower started up, then stopped, then started again, as if the operator was having an existential crisis about the meaning of grass-cutting.

I hadn't planned to do much that first evening beyond recover from the drive and maybe locate some dinner. But wandering down towards the harbour area, I took a wrong turn somewhere near the marina and found myself on a narrow path between two hedgerows that clearly wasn't meant for tourists. It led to a tiny pebble beach, maybe twenty metres across, where an elderly man was sitting on a folding chair fishing with the patient stillness of someone who'd been there since the mid-nineties. He nodded at me. I nodded back. Neither of us spoke, which felt perfectly Swedish and perfectly right.

That set the tone, really. The whole week became about those accidental discoveries. The bakery I found because I followed my nose down a side street, the sort of place where the woman behind the counter just assumed I wanted the cardamom buns because apparently everyone does, and she was absolutely correct. The nature reserve path that started behind a seemingly private gate I'd almost ignored, which led through meadows full of wildflowers and the occasional suspicious sheep.

Getting lost became the point. I'd set out with vague intentions and no map, which for someone who usually plans toilet breaks in advance felt almost recklessly free. One morning I cycled east with no destination, took a left where the sign suggested right, and found a tiny lake where locals were swimming with that casual Nordic hardiness, water still freezing, sky overcast, absolutely loving it. I waded in up to my knees, yelped like a small dog, and retreated to dry land with what dignity I could muster. A teenager on the shore found this hilarious. Fair enough, really.

The thing about Faerjestaden and the surrounding area is that it doesn't shout. There's no dramatic fjord, no iconic mountain, no single thing you must see before you die. It's just quietly, consistently lovely, and the loveliness reveals itself when you're not paying proper attention, when you've given up on being a tourist and started just being somewhere.

I think that's what I needed, though I hadn't known it driving over that bridge. The permission to be slightly incompetent, to take wrong turns, to sit on strange beaches with silent fishermen and feel like I'd stumbled onto something private and real. The holiday home helped, being properly cosy without being fussy, giving me a base to retreat to when the accidental adventures got too accidental.

On my last evening, I tried to find that pebble beach again and couldn't. Took three different wrong turns, ended up somewhere else entirely, watched the sunset from a rocky outcrop I'd never have found on purpose. The fisherman would have understood.