I should have known the holiday proper had begun when the sat-nav tried to send us up what I can only describe as a tractor's daydream. We'd been driving through Smaland for the better part of three hours, the pine forests getting thicker and the villages getting smaller, and there I was at the wheel, utterly convinced that a gravel track barely wide enough for a determined badger constituted the "main road" to Ekhult.

My partner, ever the pragmatist, suggested we stop at the last proper village before committing ourselves to this adventure. Markaryd, then. We pulled up outside a petrol station that looked like it had been built in an era when Volvo still made cars that weighed as much as small boats. Inside, behind the counter, stood a chap called Goran. I know this because his name was embroidered on his overalls, and because he introduced himself within approximately four seconds of me opening my mouth to ask directions.

"You are lost," Goran announced, not as a question but as a comfortable fact, the way one might observe that water is wet or that Swedish summers are optimistic at best.

I admitted we were trying to find Ekhult, and his face lit up like I'd mentioned a favourite cousin.

"Ekhult! Yes, yes. You take the proper road, not this computer road." He tapped my phone screen with a finger that had clearly spent decades fixing machinery. "The computer, it does not know about the bridge. Three years now, broken. Everyone goes around by the lake, but the computer, it thinks the bridge is still there." He laughed, a tremendous rumbling thing, and called through a doorway to someone I couldn't see. "Ingrid! Come, these ones are trying to drive into the river!"

Ingrid emerged wiping her hands on a tea towel, and I had the distinct impression we'd interrupted her in the middle of something important, possibly governing the region. She was perhaps seventy, with the bearing of someone who had never once in her life tolerated nonsense. She looked us up and down, took in our British number plates, and sighed the sigh of a woman who had seen many such fools pass through Markaryd.

"The English," she said to Goran, as if we weren't standing right there. "Always with the technology."

Goran nodded solemnly. "I have given them the proper way."

"Proper way, yes, but have you told them about the elk?"

This, apparently, was crucial information that Goran had neglected. Ingrid took over with the efficiency of a general briefing troops. There had been an elk, she explained, a young bull that had taken to standing in the field near the turning for Ekhult. Not aggressive, mind, but curious. Very curious about cars. Especially foreign cars. She fixed me with a look that suggested I was not to disappoint her by provoking this elk.

We thanked them profusely, bought some dubious-looking liquorice that Ingrid insisted was "good for the journey," and set off with handwritten directions on the back of a receipt. The proper road was indeed proper, in a relative sense, and we found the turning for Ekhult without further incident.

The house itself materialised through the trees like something from a storybook, red paint and white trim and a veranda that sagged just enough to be charming rather than alarming. I was still gawping at it when a figure emerged from the neighbouring property, a man in wellies and a flat cap who introduced himself as Bengt and who, I would later learn, had lived in the area for sixty-two years and considered it his personal responsibility to know everything about everyone.

"You're the English," he said, with the same certainty Goran had applied to my lostness. "Ingrid telephoned. She said you were coming. Also that you have a blue car and that the man drives too fast."

I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it again. Some battles are not worth fighting, particularly when your opponent has a telephone network that apparently transmits information faster than any technology I possessed.

Bengt helped us with our bags, which was fortunate as I had packed with the optimism of someone who believes Sweden in June might resemble the Mediterranean. He told us about the house, about the well water, about the proper way to stack firewood, and about his wife Ulla who made excellent jam and would be round tomorrow with a jar "whether you want it or not."

By the time he left, the light was fading through the pines and the house was warm from the stove we'd managed to light without burning anything crucial. I stood on that sagging veranda with a cup of tea, listening to a silence so complete it felt almost deliberate, and thought about how we'd arrived here not through technology but through the accumulated kindness of strangers who found our incompetence more amusing than annoying.

The elk, I should mention, made its appearance the following morning, standing in the field exactly where Ingrid had promised, watching our blue car with what I can only describe as philosophical interest. I drove past slowly, very slowly, feeling the weight of multiple expectations upon me, and the creature merely blinked and returned to its grazing.

Some places, I reflected, you arrive at by accident. Others, it seems, are waiting for you all along, complete with locals who have already decided who you are and what you need. I had come to Smaland expecting solitude and found something rather better: a community small enough to notice you, and generous enough to forgive you for being exactly the sort of person who follows a sat-nav into a non-existent river.