The thing about driving to Oskarshamn is that you convince yourself the journey is half the fun, right up until hour six when you have eaten every snack in the car and your passenger has developed strong opinions about Swedish road signage. We had trundled down from Stockholm, through endless forests of pine and birch, past lakes that looked like spilled mercury in the afternoon light, and by the time we spotted the turn for our holiday home, I was ready to kiss the tarmac.

That is when I performed my small but magnificent mishap.

I had been entrusted with the key code, carefully written on a crumpled receipt at the bottom of my bag. The property, a proper little red wooden cottage with white trim that looked like it had wandered straight out of a picture book, sat waiting for us. I punched in the numbers with the confidence of a man who had not looked at said receipt in six hours. The lock beeped accusingly. I tried again, slower, as if the keypad might be impressed by my patience. Nothing. My partner, who had been photographing a particularly handsome birch tree, returned to find me muttering at a door handle like a man negotiating with a stubborn goat.

Turns out I had invented an entirely new number. The actual code was on my phone, which had been in my pocket the entire time, broadcasting my location to various satellites while I stood there making a fool of myself. The door swung open eventually, and I stepped inside with the sheepish grin of someone who had just been outsmarted by his own incompetence.

What a place, though. The first thing that hits you is the smell, that particular Swedish cottage scent of wood and faint pine and something else I could not place, probably decades of happy holidays baked into the walls. The living room opened up with enormous windows facing the water, and I stood there like a lemon, bag still on my shoulder, staring at the view. The archipelago stretched out in fragments of rock and spruce, little islands dotted about like someone had tossed them casually into the Baltic. A boat puttered past in the distance, probably someone who actually knew how to read their own key codes.

The kitchen was one of those practical Swedish affairs where everything has a home and a purpose, none of your chaotic British drawer-of-mysteries situation. I found myself opening cupboards just to admire the organisation. My partner started laughing at me, but honestly, there is something deeply soothing about a well-arranged spice rack when you have spent the day failing at basic tasks.

We dumped our bags in the bedroom, which had that clean, spare Scandinavian thing going on, all pale wood and good light. I flopped onto the bed and immediately felt the day catch up with me, that particular tiredness of motorway miles and fresh air and the mild adrenaline of being somewhere new. Through the window I could see a proper Swedish barbecue area, one of those chunky wooden numbers that looks like it could survive the apocalypse.

By evening we were sitting on the terrace with mugs of coffee that had gone slightly cold because we kept getting distracted by the view. The light does something extraordinary up here, hanging about for hours in that drawn-out northern way, turning everything golden and soft. I watched a family of ducks paddle past the rocky shoreline below, completely unbothered by our presence, and thought about how I had nearly let my own daftness spoil the first ten minutes.

The mishap with the key code became our running joke for the rest of the trip, obviously. But standing there on that first evening, with the quiet of proper countryside settling around us and the water doing its gentle lapping thing, I felt that particular shift that happens when a place starts to feel like yours. The journey had been long, my brain had been mush, and I had very publicly demonstrated my own fallibility to a keypad and a patient birch tree photographer. None of it mattered. We had arrived, the cottage had welcomed us despite my best efforts, and Oskarshamn was already working its particular slow magic.