I have never been so grateful to see a composting toilet in all my life. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The journey to Hogelian Glaskogen began with the sort of optimism that only a person who has never driven through rural Varmland can muster. My partner had assured me that the sat nav knew what it was doing. The sat nav, it turned out, had opinions. Three hours from Karlstad we found ourselves on a forestry track that grew narrower with every metre, branches scraping the hire car like fingernails down a blackboard. The children, who had been bickering about tablet time since breakfast, fell into a rare and suspicious silence.

Then the fuel light came on.

This is where the mishap arrives, as promised. In my wisdom, I had decided we did not need to fill up at that last petrol station. It was ugly, I reasoned. Modern. Red and yellow signage that offended my notion of what a Swedish wilderness experience should look like. We would find somewhere more authentic. Reader, we did not find somewhere more authentic. We limped the final four kilometres to the cottage with the dashboard pinging like a microwave, every shadow in the pine forest suddenly resembling a petrol station that existed only in my imagination.

The Hogelian itself materialised through the trees like something from a storybook, if storybooks included urgent bladder needs and mild parental hysteria. Red wooden walls, white trim, a proper porch with two rocking chairs that looked as though they had been waiting specifically for us. Or for anyone with functioning adrenal glands and a full tank of petrol.

My first impression, once I stopped catastrophising, was of quiet. Not the oppressive quiet of an empty house, but the generous quiet of a place that has nothing to prove. The lake lay perhaps fifty metres beyond the tree line, grey and still in the late afternoon. A woodpecker was doing something industrious in the birch grove. The children, miraculously, had wandered off to inspect a moss-covered stump and were actually cooperating in their examination of it.

Inside, the cottage had that particular Swedish talent for being both rustic and somehow immaculate. The wood-burning stove dominated the living area, properly blackened and clearly used, not merely decorative. The kitchen had actual crockery rather than the melamine horrors I had mentally prepared for. There was a mezzanine level where the children would sleep, accessed by a ladder they immediately declared the best thing they had ever seen. I chose not to mention that I would be climbing that ladder multiple times each evening to reassure myself they had not rolled out.

The composting toilet, when I finally located it in a small outbuilding, was surprisingly inoffensive. More importantly, it was functional, which in that particular moment elevated it to architectural significance. I stood there in the half-light, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of proper countryside, and laughed at myself. The petrol station anxiety, the sat nav blame-shifting, the ridiculous notion that I could somehow curate an authentic experience by avoiding a Shell garage. Here was authenticity: a wooden box in a shed, surrounded by pine trees, with a view of nothing much at all.

We spent that first evening doing almost nothing. My partner produced sandwiches from the supplies we had thankfully packed. The children fished from the small jetty with equipment provided in the cottage's store cupboard, catching nothing and not minding in the slightest. I sat on those rocking chairs and watched the light change over the water, feeling the particular loosening that happens when you stop trying to make a holiday happen and simply let it arrive.

The fuel situation resolved itself the following morning with a helpful neighbour and a jerry can, a story for another time perhaps. But that first night, perched on the edge of the Glaskogen nature reserve with nothing but lake and forest ahead of us, I understood exactly what sort of break this would be. Not the sort with activities and itineraries and photographs for social media. The sort where you remember what your family actually looks like when nobody is rushing anywhere.

I rocked, and listened, and did absolutely nothing useful. It was tremendous.