I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me down what looked like a tractor's private driveway somewhere past Vaxjo. Three hours from Gothenburg, two coffees, one slightly tense discussion about whether I'd actually booked the right week, and there I was, squinting at a sign that definitely said "Private - No Entry" in Swedish, which I do not speak but can recognise through sheer panic.

The mishap, though. Oh, the mishap. We'd stopped at a supermarket in Lenhovda for supplies - the essentials, you know: bread, cheese, something called "falukorv" that looked like a friendly sausage, and a bottle of red that promised to make the unpacking bearable. I was feeling terribly organised, loading the boot with the smugness of someone who had remembered to bring a proper corkscrew this time. Then I shut the boot. With the car keys inside. Along with my phone. Along with, rather crucially, the key safe code for the cottage.

My partner looked at me with that particular expression that manages to be sympathetic and deeply unimpressed simultaneously. "At least the wine's safe," he said, which was technically true but not immediately helpful.

The supermarket lady, bless her, let us use her phone to call the Novasol helpline, where a very calm Swedish voice walked us through the backup procedure while I stood there contemplating whether I could live in the car park forever. Twenty minutes of mild humiliation later, a lovely local chap turned up with the spare release code, and we were finally, actually, properly on our way to Johanstorp.

And then - then - the trees closed in. Not in a threatening way, but in that extraordinary Smaland fashion where the forest seems to lean in slightly, curious about who you've brought to the party. The road narrowed to a proper track, gravel crunching underneath, and suddenly there was lake glinting through the pines and a red wooden cottage sitting among blueberry bushes like it had grown there organically.

The key safe opened. The door creaked in that satisfying, intentional way. And the smell hit me - wood, properly dried and stored, mixed with something faintly floral from the meadow outside. I stood in the doorway like a complete lemon, still holding the shopping bags, and felt something in my shoulders actually drop. You know that feeling when you've been holding tension you didn't even know was there?

The cottage was exactly the sort of unpretentious Swedish loveliness that makes you want to apologise to your own house. Simple wooden furniture, a kitchen that clearly expected you to actually cook rather than perform, windows that framed the lake like paintings someone had thoughtfully hung for your arrival. I put the "falukorv" in the fridge with the gravity of a man handling a religious artefact.

We opened the wine on the little wooden deck as the light started doing that prolonged, golden Swedish evening thing it does in late summer. A pair of ducks cruised past on the lake, clearly unbothered by our presence, possibly judging our choice of sausage. The forest was loud in the way forests are when you're not used to them - not traffic-loud, but alive-loud, full of small rustlings and distant bird conversations.

I thought about the keys in the boot, the sat nav's betrayal, my own spectacular talent for turning simple arrivals into minor adventures. And I thought about how sometimes the mishaps don't actually ruin anything - they just give the proper arrival something to push against, a small story to tell once you're finally sitting still enough to tell it.

The mosquitoes found us eventually, because of course they did. But by then we'd already decided this was exactly where we wanted to be.