I have never been so relieved to see a red wooden house in my life. After six hours of driving from Gothenburg, a wrong turn that took us through what I am fairly certain was someone's farmyard, and an argument with our sat nav that I lost quite badly, we finally spotted the Juskog Toecksfors peering through the pine trees. My wife was giving me that look. You know the one. The look that says "I told you we should have flown to Spain."

The mishap, though. I must tell you about the mishap. We had stopped at a petrol station in Karlstad to stock up on supplies, and in my enthusiasm for Swedish crispbread I managed to fill our entire boot with what I thought were essentials. Herring in three varieties. Enough coffee to wake a small village. A wheel of cheese the size of a frisbee. What I did not pack, in my infinite wisdom, was the actual cottage directions. They were sitting on our kitchen table in Surrey, having a lovely time without us. So there we were, somewhere in Varmland, surrounded by forests and lakes and absolutely no mobile signal, trying to remember whether the owner had said "turn left at the big rock" or "turn right at the unusual tree." In Sweden, let me tell you, that distinction is not as helpful as you might hope.

We found it eventually, mostly by luck and my wife's suddenly excellent memory for postcodes. And the moment we stepped out of the car, the whole daft journey melted away. The Juskog Toecksfors sits right on the water's edge, that still, dark water that Swedish lakes have, with a little wooden jetty poking out like an invitation. The house itself is the colour of a summer berry, with white trim and that satisfyingly solid feel that Scandinavian cabins seem to have. No flimsy holiday let nonsense here. This is a house that has seen winters.

The owner had left the key in a little wooden box with a combination lock, and inside we found a proper kitchen that immediately made me feel guilty about my petrol station cheese wheel. There was a wood-burning stove that my children eyed with the kind of excitement usually reserved for Christmas morning. My youngest ran straight upstairs to claim a bedroom with a window overlooking the lake, and I heard her shout down that she could see a fish jump. I chose to believe her.

That first evening, we did not do much of anything remarkable. We sat on the little terrace with mugs of that village-waking coffee, watching the light change over the water. The children poked about in the shallows with sticks. My wife and I did not talk about the wrong turn, or the farmyard, or the directions left on the kitchen table. Some things, on the first night of a holiday, are better left unmentioned.

I kept thinking about how we had nearly not come. How the hassle of it all, the driving, the packing, my own ridiculous incompetence, had made the whole thing feel like more trouble than it was worth. But sitting there, with the smell of pine and woodsmoke and the quiet that only seems to exist near large bodies of water, I felt that particular contentment that comes from having got somewhere properly remote. The mobile signal was never going to appear. The world was not going to find us. We had a week of very little planned, a lake full of fish we would probably fail to catch, and a wood-burning stove that my children were already lobbying to use despite it being August.

I think that is the thing about places like the Juskog Toecksfors. They do not dazzle you. They simply wait for you to slow down enough to notice them. And after my performance with the directions, the farmyard, and the cheese, slowing down felt exactly like what I needed.