The SatNav had other ideas about how to reach Visnums Kil, and by "other ideas" I mean it tried to send me up what I can only describe as a logging track that definitely wasn't on any map drawn by someone with a sense of self-preservation. I'd been driving up from Gothenburg, full of confidence and terrible petrol station coffee, and somewhere near Deje I took a wrong turn that felt like the beginning of a Scandinavian folk horror film. Three deer stared at me with what I can only call professional disappointment, and I reversed for nearly half a mile before finding tarmac again. My partner sat in silence, which was somehow worse than being shouted at.

We finally rolled up to the property in the late afternoon, and I will admit that the sight of that traditional red wooden house against the green of Varmland did something to my city-softened heart. The owners had left the key in a sensible little lockbox, and I fumbled with it for an embarrassingly long time given that the code was simply the last four digits of our booking reference. Inside, the place smelled of pine and something else I couldn't identify but immediately wanted to bottle. Proper Swedish simplicity: clean lines, a wood-burning stove that I mentally bookmarked for later, and windows that framed the lake like paintings that someone had actually bothered to hang straight.

We'd arrived in what the forecast optimistically called "unseasonably warm" weather, which in Swedish terms meant eighteen degrees and a sun that actually committed to the bit. This was June, and apparently Varmland was having a moment. We'd packed for drizzle and existential gloom, because that's what you do when you holiday in Scandinavia, so my partner spent the first evening doing an emergency unpack of every T-shirt they'd optimistically thrown in "just in case." I stood on the little wooden deck with a beer from the Systembolaget run we'd done in Karlstad, watching the light do that endless Scandinavian fade where you keep thinking it's about to get dark and it simply doesn't.

The plan, such as it was, involved walking. Lots of walking. The Varnan river runs near the property, and there are paths through woodland that feel properly old, the kind where you half expect to find a troll toll booth. We'd researched coastal walks along Lake Vanern, because Kristinehamn sits on its northern shore and the idea of proper lakeside hiking in warm weather felt like something we needed to earn after our respective winters. The Picasso sculpture was apparently visible from certain points, though I privately suspected we'd walk right past it while arguing about snacks.

That first morning, though, the weather turned on us with the speed of a pub argument. We'd set off in sunshine, me in shorts that suddenly felt like a terrible life choice, and within forty minutes the sky had organised itself into something genuinely cross. The warm spell broke properly, not with drama but with that steady, relentless Swedish rain that somehow gets through every layer of supposedly waterproof fabric you own. We squelched back to the house looking like failed contestants in some outdoor survival programme, and I spent twenty minutes trying to light the wood burner with damp matches while my partner made tea with the grim determination of someone who has accepted their fate.

The thing is, and I'm only admitting this because it surprised me, I didn't mind. There's something about being properly warm and dry after being properly wet and cold that hits different in a wooden house in Varmland. The rain drummed on the roof, the stove finally caught, and we sat there with our tea planning tomorrow's walk with the particular optimism of people who refuse to learn from immediate experience. The forecast said clearing by midday. We chose to believe it, because that's what holidays are for.