I should have known the satnav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's back garden in Karlstad. Three hours from Gothenburg, two wrong turns, and one spectacularly ill-advised shortcut later, I found myself bouncing down a gravel track with a boot full of shopping and a passenger who had perfected the art of the meaningful silence.

The mishap came at the final hurdle. I'd stopped at the ICA in Saffle for supplies, feeling terribly organised, and in my smugness managed to lock the car with the keys still dangling from the ignition. There we stood, surrounded by pine forest and the particular stillness of Varmland that makes every sound feel slightly amplified, watching our only means of escape flash its indicators at us like a smug mechanical cat. Forty minutes, one slightly sheepish phone call to the car hire people, and a small fortune in call-out fees later, we were mobile again. My other half suggested, with the patience of a saint who has run out of patience, that perhaps I might leave the keys in my pocket going forward.

Gatviksstugan revealed itself slowly, which is the only way a proper Swedish cabin ought to arrive. The trees parted and there it sat, red paint glowing against the green like something from a postcard I'd have dismissed as too charming to be real. A proper timber cottage with white trim, the sort of place that makes you instinctively lower your voice as you approach. The lake lay just beyond, Byalven I later learned, flat and silver in the late afternoon light with barely a ripple to disturb it.

The first thing that struck me was the smell. Not the chemical pine of air fresheners, but something deeper, woodsmoke and resin and that particular damp-earth freshness you only get where water and forest have been left to their own devices for a very long time. We hauled our bags up the steps, still bickering gently about the key incident, and pushed open the door.

Inside, the cabin managed that rare trick of being exactly as advertised yet somehow better. Light poured through windows that framed the trees like deliberate paintings. The kitchen had that satisfying solidity of proper Swedish design, nothing fancy but everything where it ought to be. I found myself opening cupboards just to confirm they existed, running my hand along the wooden railing of the loft stairs, behaving like a person who had never seen indoor furniture before.

My partner had already drifted toward the terrace, drawn by the water as if pulled on a string. We stood there with mugs of tea that tasted of the journey, watching a heron lift from the reeds with that ungainly grace they possess, and the key fiasco began its slow retreat into anecdote rather than active wound. A boat lay upturned by the shore, the sort of simple wooden rowboat that promised uncomplicated pleasures, and I felt something in my shoulders release that I had not realised I was carrying.

The evening brought that extraordinary northern quality of light that lingers long past when it has any right to, the sky refusing to darken properly, the trees slowly becoming silhouettes against a grey-blue that seemed to last for hours. We cooked badly, because we always cook badly on first nights, and ate outside wrapped in blankets against the chill that comes even in summer when the sun finally does dip low.

I woke once in the night to absolute silence, the kind that makes your ears strain for something, anything, and heard only the occasional call of something unidentified from the forest edge. By morning I had already begun to forget the frustration of locked keys and wrong turns, the small humiliations of travel giving way to the larger pleasure of having arrived somewhere that felt, against all my usual scepticism, like it might be worth the trouble.