2. 
0.
The satnav had been insisting for the last forty minutes that we were "arriving at destination," which would have been reassuring had we not been staring at a dense wall of pine trees with absolutely no sign of human habitation. My partner Dave was driving, gripping the wheel with that particular tension that suggests someone is about to say something they will later regret. Our two children, blessedly absorbed in a tablet in the back, were mercifully unaware that Dad had just missed the same turning for the third time.
"We're not lost," Dave announced, to no one in particular and with the conviction of a man who absolutely was. "The Swedes just don't believe in excessive signage. It's charming."
It was not charming at twenty past five with the light fading and a boot full of shopping from the Karlstad supermarket that we suddenly doubted would fit in whatever fridge awaited us. I had insisted we stop for supplies, loading up on meatballs, crispbread, and what I believed to be lingonberry jam but might actually have been pickled herring. My Swedish, acquired entirely from a three-week Duolingo streak in March, had failed me at the crucial moment.
Then suddenly there it was, nestled between two rocky outcrops and a modest slope down to the water: our little red cottage at Acksjon, just outside Forshaga. The classic Falun red paint, the white trim, the small wooden deck jutting toward the lake. It looked precisely like the photographs, which in my experience of holiday bookings is nothing short of miraculous. I may have actually gasped, though Dave maintains it was more of a strangled cough.
The mishap, when it came, was entirely mine. I had the key code, I had the instructions, I had even photographed the relevant email. What I did not have was any functional memory of which of the two identical-looking doors was the main entrance. I marched confidently to the nearer one, punched in the code with theatrical flourish, and shoved. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing. Dave stood behind me with the first bag, saying nothing, which was worse than anything he could have voiced. It took an embarrassingly long minute of muttered Swedish curses and escalating panic before I noticed the small, weathered sign reading "Bastu" and realised I had been attempting to break into the sauna.
The actual door, three metres to the left, opened with satisfying ease.
Inside, the cottage unfolded in that particular way of Scandinavian holiday homes: compact but never cramped, everything purposeful, nothing excessive. The kitchen opened directly to the living area with its wood-burning stove, already laid with kindling as if someone had anticipated our incompetence. Large windows framed the lake, which in the dying light had turned to hammered pewter. I caught my own reflection, slightly wild-eyed still from the journey, and had one of those small moments of wondering when exactly I had become this person: the one who panics at doors, who over-shops in foreign supermarkets, who needs a holiday from the mere effort of arriving somewhere.
But then the children thundered past to investigate the bunk beds, and Dave began unpacking with the quiet efficiency he reserves for moments when he has been proved right about something, and the wood stove caught with its first match, and the lake sat there waiting for morning.
We made a simple supper of those meatballs, which were indeed meatballs and not some herring-based surprise. The children fell asleep almost immediately, exhausted by travel and the particular deep quiet of the Varmland countryside. Dave and I sat with wine on the small deck, watching the last colour drain from the sky, not talking much, listening to the water and the distant call of something we couldn't identify.
The sauna, I noted with some satisfaction, would keep until tomorrow.
