I had been driving for the better part of three hours from Vienna when I realised, with the sort of sinking feeling that only arrives after you've been confidently wrong for a very long time, that I had been following the sat nav's cheerful instructions towards a place called Strem that was definitely not my Strem. There are, it turns out, at least two villages with nearly identical names in Austria, and I had been dutifully heading towards the wrong one with all the misplaced confidence of a man who once spent twenty minutes arguing with a German ticket machine.

By the time I finally corrected course and found the actual Strem in Burgenland, I was several hours late, thoroughly rattled, and in desperate need of the loo. The rental cottage sat at the end of a narrow lane, surrounded by flat farmland that stretched to the horizon like a rumpled green tablecloth. I stumbled out of the car, stretched my complaining back, and promptly walked straight into a low-hanging branch from what I later learned was a very old, very productive walnut tree. I stood there rubbing my forehead, luggage scattered around me, and thought: well, this is either going to be brilliant or a complete disaster.

It turned out to be brilliant, though not in any way I had planned.

The next morning, still slightly dazed from travel and walnut-related trauma, I set out for what I intended to be a gentle stroll to a recommended wine tavern about two miles east. I had a map. I had good intentions. I had, crucially, the directional sense of a confused pigeon. Within forty minutes I was hopelessly lost among fields of sunflowers that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction, their heavy heads nodding in what felt suspiciously like mockery.

I kept walking, because what else do you do? The Buschenschank I had aimed for was nowhere in sight. Instead I found a dirt track that led between two hedgerows and opened onto a small clearing where an elderly man sat beside a wooden stall selling bottles of Zweigelt with nothing more than an honesty box and a handwritten sign. His German was thick with local dialect, his eyebrows spectacular, and when I explained my predicament he laughed for a solid minute before pressing a glass of young wine into my hand and refusing payment.

That accidental discovery became the pattern of my week. I never did find that first wine tavern. What I found instead was better, though I could never reliably locate any of it again. A lake called Neufelder See, stumbled upon when I took a wrong turning supposedly towards Eisenstadt. A family-run bakery in a village whose name I never properly caught, where the woman behind the counter spoke no English but communicated entirely through enthusiastic gestures and samples of poppy seed strudel. A marshy area near Strem where storks stood one-legged in the reeds, utterly unconcerned by my presence, watching the sunset with the patience of creatures who have never once needed a sat nav.

There was something quietly transformative about this accidental tourism. I am, by nature, a planner. I research restaurants. I bookmark walking routes. I read reviews with the seriousness of a military strategist. Yet here I was, day after day, wandering without purpose through a landscape that rewarded aimlessness with unexpected gifts. The flatness of Burgenland, which I had initially found almost unsettling after years of British hills and hedgerows, became its greatest generosity. You could see for miles. You could set out towards nothing in particular and find something worth finding.

On my final evening, I drove to the actual recommended wine tavern, finally, using proper coordinates and everything. It was perfectly nice. The wine was excellent, the view pleasant, the service efficient. I sat there with my glass of Blaufrankisch and found myself thinking about the honesty box man, his eyebrows, his generous laugh. I thought about the storks, the strudel woman, the sunflower fields where I had briefly panicked and then, strangely, stopped panicking.

I had come to Burgenland with an itinerary and found something better by repeatedly failing to follow it. There is probably a lesson there, though I suspect if I try too hard to apply it I will have missed the point entirely. Some places, I think, simply ask you to get lost in them. Strem and its surrounding flatlands did that for me, one wrong turn at a time, until the wrong turns started feeling like the whole purpose of being there.