The trouble with relying on sat nav in rural Sweden, I have discovered, is that it has absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever. There we were, three hours out of Karlstad, convinced we were moments from our cottage near Skagern, when the robotic voice announced we had arrived. We had not arrived. We had, in fact, pulled into a farmyard containing one very unimpressed horse and what I can only describe as a tractor graveyard. My husband Nigel shot me that look, the one that says "you booked this," though to be fair he was the one holding the phone.

Twenty minutes of increasingly tense reversing later, we found the actual turn. The proper road to our holiday home wound through birch woods that looked like they had been painted by someone with a very particular fondness for vertical lines. Sunlight came through in stripes, making everything feel slightly theatrical, as if nature itself was putting on a matinee.

The cottage sat where the trees opened up, a proper red wooden affair with white trim that made me immediately think of every picture book about Scandinavia I had ever thumbed through as a child. There was a small deck with chairs that looked like they had witnessed many a contemplative coffee, and beyond that, the lake. I will admit I actually said "oh" out loud, which is not like me. Nigel said "blimey," which very much is.

The key was in the lockbox exactly where the instructions said, though getting it out required the dexterity of a surgeon and the patience of a fisherman. Our youngest, Molly, filmed the whole performance on her phone for posterity, or more likely for ammunition at a later date. The door opened with that particular Swedish heaviness, solid wood that has known many winters, and the smell hit us immediately. Wood, mostly, and something faintly of pine cleaner, and that indefinable scent of a place that has been closed up waiting for you.

Inside was exactly the sort of honest simplicity I had hoped for. A kitchen that looked like it actually wanted to be cooked in, rather than merely photographed. A living area with a wood-burning stove that I immediately decided was the most important feature of any room anywhere. The bedrooms were upstairs under sloping ceilings that Nigel, being six foot, would spend the week complaining about and I would spend the week finding amusing.

I put the kettle on, because that is what one does. The tap water tasted of nothing at all, which somehow felt like a luxury. We stood at the kitchen window looking out at the water, still slightly dazed from the journey and the horse incident and the general displacement of being somewhere entirely new. A small boat was tied to a jetty that looked like it had been built by someone who understood that things do not need to be perfect to be perfectly functional.

Molly had already found the badminton set in the shed and was attempting to recruit her father. I stayed with my tea, watching them through the glass, thinking about how rarely we stand still in ordinary life, how strange and welcome it feels to arrive somewhere with no particular ambition beyond existing in it for a while.

The stove would need lighting later. There would be a trip to the nearest shop for supplies, and almost certainly another navigational adventure. For now, though, there was just this view, this quiet, this sense of having stumbled into exactly the right place even if the getting there had been slightly ridiculous.

Nigel hit the shuttlecock into the lake. Molly laughed like I had not heard in months. I poured another cup, and thought that perhaps the horse had been a blessing in disguise, a necessary detour to make the proper arrival feel earned.