The sat nav had been chirping at me for the better part of three hours, and I had long since stopped listening to it. Somewhere past Orebro, on a road that grew narrower with every mile, I finally admitted we were lost. My partner sat in the passenger seat, arms folded, watching a family of deer watch us from the verge. "You said Tiveden was straightforward," she said. I had said that. I had also said I had packed the walking boots. The boots, it turned out, were still in the hallway at home, next to the wellies I had also forgotten.

We found the cottage eventually, down a track that tested the undercarriage of our hire car and my limited Swedish vocabulary. The place sat among birch and pine, red-painted and proper-looking, with a small deck that caught the afternoon sun. I stepped out and immediately felt the warmth of it, that particular Scandinavian summer heat that makes you foolishly optimistic about the weather forecast. The owner had left the key in a tin shaped like a moose. I dropped the tin in the flowerbed while trying to photograph it. Some first impressions write themselves.

Inside, the cottage smelled of wood and whatever they use to make Swedish cabins feel immediately comforting. There was a small kitchen with a view of nothing but trees, a living room with a sofa that had seen decades of use, and a bedroom with windows you could actually open wide to let the warm air move through. I stood on the deck in my socks, still in driving clothes, and felt the first proper breeze of the holiday. My partner appeared with two cups of coffee she had found in a tin marked "not moose." We drank them looking at a map of local trails that the owner had left on the table, trails that wound down toward the lakeshore and along the rocky coastline of the area.

The plan had been simple. We had researched coastal walks, noted the paths that followed the water's edge, packed accordingly apart from the obvious footwear omission. The forecast had promised dry warmth for days. We were going to stride out each morning, cover proper ground, return with appetite and photographs. That first evening, still in my socks, I mapped out our ambitions on the kitchen table. Day one: the shore path to the nature reserve. Day two: the longer loop past the old fishing spots. Day three: whatever we felt like, because we would be seasoned walkers by then, tanned and capable.

I woke to rain. Not English drizzle, but proper Swedish rain, the kind that arrives with purpose and stays for breakfast. The deck was slick, the trees heavy, the view reduced to shades of grey and green. My partner made more coffee and did not say anything about the boots. I studied the map and found that several of the coastal trails became, according to the small print, "challenging after prolonged precipitation." The word "prolonged" seemed unnecessarily pointed.

By midday the rain had softened to something more walkable, and we set out anyway, me in borrowed trainers from the cottage's small collection of left-behind items. They were slightly too large and had "Goteborg Marathon 2017" written on the side. The path to the shore was muddy in ways that British mud only dreams of being, deep and clinging and somehow personal. We slithered down to the water through birch woods that dripped on us long after the rain had stopped, emerging finally onto granite shelves that sloped toward the lake. The warmth returned as we walked, that changeable Swedish summer doing its usual business, and we found ourselves peeling off layers while picking our way along the coast. The water was dark and still, the far shore invisible in low cloud, and the path demanded attention, hopping from rock to rock, finding grip on wet stone.

We walked for two hours and saw no one. The trainers squelched. My partner laughed at me every time I slipped, which was often. The coast here is not dramatic cliffs and crashing waves but something quieter, older, granite worn smooth by ice and time, forest pressing right to the water's edge. We found a small cove where someone had built a rough fire pit from stones, and sat on a log that was probably also older than me, eating the sandwiches we had packed in optimistic quantity.

The weather turned again as we headed back, the warmth building into something almost humid, the clouds breaking to let through light that made the wet forest shine. I sweated in the marathon trainers, cursed my forgotten boots, and felt something shift in my chest that had nothing to do with the walking. It was the particular pleasure of being somewhere you did not plan perfectly, where the mishaps were small and the compensation immediate. The path required enough attention that thinking became unnecessary. The body did the work. The mind, for once, followed along.

That evening, clean and slightly sun-pinked despite the morning rain, we sat on the deck with a bottle of something local and white. The marathon trainers sat on the step, drying slowly. My partner had found a pair of sandals in the cottage's charity box of abandoned footwear, and I had promised to buy proper boots in Orebro the next day, a promise I would keep with unusual diligence. The forest was loud with evening birds, the warmth holding, the light lasting longer than it had any right to.

I thought about the walks we had planned, the coastal routes we had marked, and how little they would resemble what we actually did. The rain would come again, would change our routes, would send us down different paths or keep us near the cottage, reading the books we had brought and arguing about nothing. The warmth would return, unpredictable and welcome, and we would walk when we could, in whatever footwear came to hand, along that quiet shoreline that asked nothing of us but attention.

The sat nav sat silent in the car. I had not bothered to reset it. Some places, I was learning, you find by getting lost first.