“No offense,” he said with a laugh, waving smoke away from his face, “but why are you here?”

Why was I here, indeed?

A 76-square-mile speck off the southwest coast of Estonia, Muhu sounds more like the punch line of a knock-knock joke than a destination. It’s the gateway to the much larger neighboring island of Saaremaa, a popular holiday spot in the Baltic region’s sneeze-and-you’ll-miss-it summer season. These are not places you simply stumble upon, requiring a nearly two-hour drive from Tallinn followed by a 30-minute car ferry. Most of Muhu’s traffic comes from commuters embarking from Virtsu on the mainland to Kuivastu, Muhu’s main port, then cutting across the island before continuing on over a bridge to Saaremaa. It’s an Estonian Delaware, a place plenty of people pass through but few find reason to linger.

And yet, there I was, and I was determined to uncover something to render it worth the effort.

A large part of the reason I made the journey to Muhu was because of a hotel. Padaste Manor is the kind of place you read about once in a magazine, then can never fully extricate from your subconscious — Googling it absent-mindedly after a punishing day at work to gaze longingly at rustic wood-beamed rooms, old-fashioned bathtubs and cozy fur throws. When I started planning a Baltic road trip, the first thing I did was map it out and coax it into our itinerary. As Sabiha and I cruised through the Estonian countryside, all impossibly green fields studded prettily with perfect cylindrical bales of hay and ruins of 18th-century neo-Classical manor houses, my anticipation grew. By the time we drove onto the ferry, it was at a fever pitch. Would it live up to the hype?

At my first glimpse of the stone-and-vine-clad carriage house at the end of the driveway, I knew I’d been on to something; by the time I crunched my way up the gravel path to the rose-tinted manor house, I was patting myself on the back.