The satnav had been insisting "FLEN" in that aggressively calm robotic voice for the better part of two hours, and I had just started to believe we were being led to a fictional place, possibly Narnia, when my partner announced we had missed the turning. Again. This was particularly impressive given that Flen is not exactly sprawling. We had managed to overshoot a town you could probably cross with a decent frisbee throw. The comedy highlight came when I attempted a three-point turn on what I confidently assumed was a quiet lane, only to discover it was someone's driveway, and that someone was already standing in it, holding a wheelbarrow and wearing the resigned expression of a person who has seen this before.

We eventually found the holiday home down a gravel track that crunched satisfyingly under the tyres. It was one of those traditional Swedish wooden houses, painted that particular rusty red that seems to glow in the evening light, with white trim around the windows and a small porch that looked purpose-built for sitting with a cup of something. The owners had left the key in a padlock box with a combination that turned out to be the year the house was built, a detail I only worked out after trying their phone number, my birthday, and the current temperature in Malmo.

Inside smelled of pine and something else I could not identify but immediately liked. The floors creaked in friendly greeting. There was a proper wood-burning stove that I looked at with the wary respect of a person who has never successfully lit one without producing either smoke or shame. The kitchen had a view over what I later learned was Lake Baven, though at that moment I just thought "big water, very pretty, probably contains fish with opinions."

We had arrived in late June with ambitious plans. The weather app had shown a solid week of sun, temperatures in the mid-twenties, the kind of Scandinavian summer that makes you forget drizzle exists. Our intention was to walk extensively, to become the sort of people who casually mention "oh we did the coastal path" as if it were nothing. The Sormland coast, with its rocky outcrops and hidden inlets, was supposedly magnificent, and I had packed walking boots that I had actually waterproofed in advance, a level of preparation that felt almost smug.

The first morning delivered on promise. We set off from the house down to the lake shore, following a narrow path through birch and pine that occasionally opened to reveal glimpses of water. The light was that particular Scandinavian brightness, clean and sharp, and I found myself walking with the unnecessary briskness of a person trying to deserve their surroundings. We reached a small beach of rounded stones where the water lapped with the polite regularity of a good houseguest. My partner went in up to their knees and made a noise that I interpreted as positive. I remained on shore, having established early in life that I am not a cold water person, a category that in Sweden covers most months and most bodies of water.

By afternoon of day two, the weather had begun its shift. Not dramatically, not yet, but the sky developed a particular flatness, the kind that experienced walkers recognise. We pressed on along a marked trail heading north, through woodland that alternated between dense spruce and more open areas of heath and rock. The terrain was not demanding but it was engaging, requiring enough attention that conversation became intermittent, broken by observations about fungi or the particular way light fell through leaves. We saw no other walkers, which felt either like privilege or like we had missed a memo.

The rain started properly on day three. Not the dramatic downpour that makes for good stories, but a steady, persistent drizzle that found its way into hoods and down collars with the determination of something that had nowhere else to be. We attempted the coastal path anyway, reasoning that proper waterproofs and British stubbornness would see us through. They did, technically, for about ninety minutes, at which point we admitted that "moist" had progressed through "damp" to something closer to "inhabited by water." We turned back, passing a Swedish couple who nodded at us with the understanding of fellow enthusiasts who had also checked the forecast and chosen differently.

The remaining days became an exercise in adaptive enthusiasm. We walked shorter loops, local paths through farmland and forest that the owner had marked on a hand-drawn map left in the kitchen. These were not the dramatic coastal hikes we had planned, but they had their own character, passing small lakes where dragonflies hovered with improbable precision, through meadows where the grass was tall enough to brush your palms. We learned to set out early, before the afternoon weather made its decisions, and to carry coffee in a flask that became as essential as the map.

On our final morning, the sun returned with what felt like apology. We managed a longer walk south along the coast, the proper rocky shoreline we had been chasing, scrambling over granite worn smooth by ice and water, finding inlets where the sea lay still and dark. It was magnificent, genuinely, the kind of landscape that makes you slightly embarrassed about complaining. We sat on a warm rock and ate sandwiches that tasted better than they had any right to, and I thought about how the changed plans had forced a different rhythm, a slower attention to what was nearby rather than what we had projected.

The drive back to the airport was uneventful, satnav cooperative, no driveways invaded. I thought about the wood stove, which I had eventually learned to light without disaster, and the small porch where we had spent evenings watching the light change over the lake, sometimes dry, sometimes accepting the drizzle as part of the package. The boots went back in the cupboard with actual mud on them, which felt like proper achievement. We had not done what we set out to do, not exactly, but we had done something, and the something had been enough.