I have never been so grateful for a sat nav giving up on me as I was on the way to our holiday let in Grossarl. There we were, trundling through the Salzburgerland hills, me smugly following the woman's voice telling me to turn left in 200 metres, when the signal vanished completely. Just poof. Gone. My partner gave me that look, the one that says "you insisted on driving" without actually saying it. We ended up down a farm track so narrow I had to fold the wing mirrors in, staring at a very unimpressed cow who seemed personally offended by our presence. I waved at her. She did not wave back.

By the time we found our way back to something resembling a road, I had accepted my fate as navigator-in-chief while my partner drove in dignified silence. And honestly? Getting properly lost turned out to be the making of the whole trip.

We stumbled across a tiny chapel near Krotschach that I cannot find on any map for love nor money. It sat there with its wooden shingle roof and hand-painted Stations of the Cross, utterly ignored by the world. The door was unlocked, which felt almost indecent in Britain, so we crept inside like burglars. Someone had left fresh wildflowers on the altar, still damp from morning rain. No sign of who. No collection box, no visitor book, no gift shop. Just a space that existed because someone, somewhere, still cared enough to maintain it. I sat on the pew and felt genuinely moved, which surprised me. I am not normally the pew-sitting type.

The property itself, when we finally reached it, was one of those traditional Alpine places with more wood panelling than seems structurally necessary. The owner had left us a note in charmingly direct English: "Key under frog. Do not break anything." The frog was a ceramic garden ornament. I nearly broke it immediately by tripping over it in the dark later that evening, which my partner found hysterical until he did the exact same thing the next morning.

But the real discovery came from wandering without purpose. We took a path behind the village that started as a proper trail and quickly degenerated into something a local sheep probably considered a motorway. It led to a meadow where an elderly man was making hay using methods I thought had died out with his great-grandfather. He waved us over, shared his flask of something that made my eyes water, and explained through enthusiastic gestures that his family had cut this field for four generations. I understood perhaps one word in ten but nodded along like a politician at a constituency meeting.

Another wrong turn took us to a stream pool so perfectly clear you could count the stones on the bottom. We spent an afternoon there doing absolutely nothing productive, which is not like me at all. I am usually the person checking emails on holiday, making sure the world can still reach me. The mountains had no signal either, and for once I did not mind.

By the end of the week, I had stopped checking maps altogether. We found a bakery that only opened when the owner felt like it, a bench with the best possible view of the valley that no guidebook mentions, and a sense of peace I had not realised I was missing. The cow, I am fairly certain, has forgiven me. I have not forgiven the sat nav, but I probably should.