I have never been brilliant at reading the small print, which is how I ended up on a bus to Muskoe convinced I had booked a cosy flat in central Stockholm. The website said "Stockholm, Sweden" in big friendly letters. The bit about it being on an island forty minutes from the city centre? Apparently I scrolled past that in my excitement. So there I was, rucksack stuffed with city clothes and one ambitious pair of canvas trainers, watching the bus deposit me at a jetty with nothing but pine trees and suspiciously calm water for company.

A small boat took me across to Muskoe, and I will admit my first thought was not charitable. Where was the cobblestone? The hipster coffee? I had packed for pavement pounding and instead found a wooden cottage with a veranda that creaked in the most satisfying way, surrounded by rocks that looked like they had been arranged by a giant with excellent taste in landscaping. The property had kayaks stacked by the water and a path that vanished into greenery. I stood there in my inadequate shoes feeling like someone had handed me a fishing rod at a nightclub.

The owner, a cheerful Swede called Lars, appeared from behind the cottage with a wheelbarrow and no apparent surprise at my city-boy bewilderment. He explained that the coastal path ran five miles in either direction, that the weather was unusually warm for June, and that I might want proper boots. I laughed nervously. He looked at my trainers, looked at the rocky shoreline, and said nothing. That silence spoke volumes.

I spent my first afternoon attempting a walk anyway, because stubbornness is my primary personality trait. The path along the coast was breathtaking, genuinely so, with granite dropping into clear water and little inlets where you could imagine Vikings hiding from their responsibilities. But my canvas shoes turned against me with spectacular speed. One moment I was admiring the view, the next I was performing an unplanned slide down a warm rock face, ending in a patch of something soft and green that Lars later identified as cloudberry leaves. I lay there for a moment, staring at a sky that was insultingly blue, and had what I can only describe as a moment of clarity. Or possibly mild concussion.

I was not in Stockholm. I was somewhere better, if I could stop fighting it.

The warm weather had drawn locals out in small boats, and families were swimming in bays that looked almost Mediterranean except for the absolute lack of Mediterranean behaviour. No shrieking, no inflatables, just calm immersion in cold water followed by peaceful drying on rocks. I walked back to the cottage slowly, accepting my shoe fate, and found Lars had left a pair of borrowed walking boots on my veranda. No note. Just boots, size approximately mine, with soles that suggested serious business.

The next morning I set out before the heat built, properly shod at last. The coastal path became my entire holiday. I walked north to a tiny harbour where an old man sold smoked fish from his shed and pretended not to understand my pointing. I walked south to a beach where the granite had been worn smooth by glaciers and sunbathers, and where I finally swam properly, the cold shock giving way to something almost spiritual. The warm weather held, unusual enough that locals commented on it constantly, and each day I planned longer walks that the temperature made not just possible but joyous.

I never made it to central Stockholm. The bus timetable, my original enemy, became irrelevant. I walked until hungry, ate whatever I had carried, walked back to shower and fall asleep on that creaking veranda. My city clothes stayed folded in my rucksack like a reproach, or perhaps a reminder of who I had been when I arrived.

On my final morning I watched the boat approach across water that was already warm with promise of another glorious day, and I felt something suspiciously like gratitude for my own incompetence. I had come for cobblestones and found granite, come for crowds and found empty coastline, come for the wrong thing entirely and somehow arrived exactly where I needed to be. The boots went back on Lars's porch with a note and a bottle of something local. My trainers, traitors that they were, came home with me, still faintly green, still slightly damp, still utterly useless for anything resembling proper walking.