I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to a little place near Stockholm proved me absolutely right. We had booked what the listing cheerfully called an "Uppsala/Norrtaelje/Stockholm" property, which sounded impressively connected until I realised it was essentially a charming wooden cabin in the Swedish countryside pretending to be three places at once. My partner, ever the optimist, assured me this meant "flexibility." I suspected it meant "nowhere near a proper train station."

The journey from Arlanda Airport started well enough. We collected our hire car, I confidently punched the address into Google Maps, and we set off in high spirits with the windows down and ABBA playing at a volume that felt culturally appropriate. Twenty minutes later, I missed a turning somewhere near Norrtaelje and found myself on a road that grew progressively narrower, bumpier, and more convinced that motor vehicles were an affront to nature. The "small mishap" came when I reversed to turn around, misjudged the width of a drainage ditch, and deposited our left rear wheel in what I can only describe as a very Swedish bog. There we sat, tilted at an undignified angle, while two cyclists passed by without breaking pace or expression. I have never felt more British in my life.

My partner, who had been dozing, woke to find me standing in long grass contemplating whether Swedish emergency services would appreciate being called about a man who could not operate a Fiat. She laughed for approximately four minutes before walking to the nearest farmhouse, returning with a farmer who spoke no English but communicated profound sympathy through his eyebrows. He towed us out with a tractor that looked older than my father, refused payment with a firm hand gesture, and pointed us back toward civilisation with the patient air of someone who had done this many times before.

We arrived at the cabin two hours late, smelling faintly of bog, and promptly fell in love with the place. It sat among pine trees with a deck that caught the evening sun, and beyond the garden lay a path that led, according to our host's handwritten note, "to the water, twenty minutes walking." The note added, almost as an afterthought, that the weather had been "unusually warm" and that we should "enjoy while it lasts." This would prove prophetic.

The following morning dawned bright and almost hot, which apparently counts as a heatwave in Sweden. We set out with water bottles and ambitious plans for a long coastal hike, following a trail that wound through forest before emerging onto rocky shoreline. The Baltic stretched before us, flat and glittering, and we walked for hours along the coast, clambering over granite outcrops and stopping to swim in sheltered coves where the water was cold enough to steal your breath but refreshing enough to make you brave it twice. We saw hardly anyone, just the occasional sailing boat and a seal who watched us with evident disdain from a distant rock.

By the third day, the weather had turned. Not gradually, not politely, but with the sudden conviction of a door slamming. We woke to grey skies and a wind that made the pine trees hiss like disapproving relatives. Our planned hike along a longer coastal trail suddenly seemed less appealing, and we stood at the kitchen window with our coffee, watching the weather make our decisions for us. I felt briefly defeated, that particular holiday frustration of plans unravelled, before my partner suggested we simply walk anyway, just differently.

So we did. We layered up in everything we had brought, discovered we had not brought enough, and set out into what the Swedes apparently call "typical July." The same coastline transformed entirely. The grey water chopped against rocks we had sunbathed on yesterday. The forest path felt secretive, hushed, the kind of walking where you hear every footfall and notice every mushroom pushing through pine needles. We walked shorter distances, stopped more frequently for fika in sheltered spots, and talked more than we had during the sunny days, when swimming and sun-warmed rock had been sufficient entertainment.

On our final morning, the weather cleared again, as if making a point. We walked one last time to our favourite cove, now transformed back to something inviting, and I stood there thinking about how thoroughly my small disaster with the ditch had set the tone. The holiday had not gone to plan, not once, not really. The location was not quite what the listing suggested. The weather had done as it pleased. I had needed rescuing by a Swedish farmer with expressive eyebrows. And yet standing there, with salt on my skin and my partner throwing stones into water that caught the returning sunlight, I could not remember a trip I had enjoyed more. Some places, I think, are better approached without too much certainty about where you are going, whether in a hire car or in how you spend your days. We left the cabin that afternoon, slightly sunburned, slightly wind-chapped, and already arguing about when we could return, preferably with a better sense of direction and perhaps a tractor on speed dial.