The thing about driving to Oestra Viker is that you genuinely start to believe Sweden has no end. We left Karlstad in good spirits, full of petrol station coffee and misplaced confidence, and promptly missed our turning somewhere near Filipstad because I was too busy pointing at a moose warning sign like a complete tourist. My partner, who had been navigating with the stoic patience of someone who has done this before, simply sighed and opened another packet of crisps. Forty-five minutes of increasingly narrow forest roads later, we found ourselves at a dead end beside a lake so still it looked like someone had forgotten to press play. I got out to turn the car around, stepped straight into a puddle that went over my boot, and stood there laughing like an idiot while a family of ducks watched in obvious judgment.

By the time we actually reached Oestra Viker, I was driving in my socks with the heater blasting and a damp trouser leg that would haunt me for the rest of the evening. The property sits on the edge of Lake Ostra Viker, and I will never forget that first glimpse through the birch trees. The sun was doing that low, golden thing it does for hours on end in late summer, and the water had turned this impossible colour, somewhere between copper and honey. I stopped the car right there on the gravel track, probably blocking something, and just stared. My partner had to remind me that the engine was still running.

The cottage itself is one of those proper red wooden affairs with white trim, the kind that makes you feel like you have stumbled into a children's book illustration. It looks as though it has been there forever, settled comfortably into the landscape rather than imposed upon it. I hobbled up to the door in my socks, still ridiculous, and found the key exactly where promised, hidden in a little wooden box that someone had carved with a rather charmingly wonky fish. The door creaked in the most satisfying way, that particular sound of a place that has been opened and closed through decades of summers.

Inside smelled of pine and something else, something I could not place until later when I realised it was simply the lake coming in through the open windows. The living area has these enormous windows facing the water, and I stood there with my damp foot forgotten, watching the light move across the room like it was searching for something. The furniture is simple, unpretentious, the sort of worn comfort that makes you want to exhale properly for the first time in months. I ran my hand along the wooden kitchen table and could almost feel the accumulated breakfasts, the card games, the late-night conversations I would never be part of.

I should mention the sauna at this point, because it is essentially a small wooden hut right down by the water's edge, and I became immediately obsessed with it. We had not even unpacked the car and I was already planning my first plunge into that lake, never mind that I had spent the entire journey complaining about the cold. There is something about the particular silence of Varmland that undoes your sensible plans. It is not empty silence, not at all. You can hear the trees moving, water lapping, occasionally the distant sound of a motorboat from some other hidden cottage. It makes you want to participate, to be cold and warmed and cold again, to feel something specific and immediate.

My partner found me on the little wooden jetty, still in my ridiculous socks, trying to determine the depth of the water with a stick I had found. They did not even comment, simply handed me a cup of tea they had somehow already made, and sat down beside me. We watched a heron lift off from the far shore, all gangly elegance and apparent reluctance, and I thought about how I had started this day grumbling in a petrol station and ended it here, slightly damp, entirely content, waiting for nothing in particular. Some mishaps, I decided, steering you wrong for nearly an hour, soaking your only decent boots, they do not really feel like mishaps once you arrive. They feel like the necessary, slightly absurd journey to somewhere that could not be reached by the obvious route.