I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Trento in Tyrol did not disappoint. We had been driving from Innsbruck Airport for what felt like hours, winding through valleys that grew greener and more ridiculous with every mile. My partner was navigating using a phone with three percent battery, I was convinced we had missed our turn somewhere near Wörgl, and then the sat nav cheerfully announced we had arrived at a field full of very unimpressed cows.

The actual Trento was another ten minutes up a road that grew narrower and more committed to its own opinions about tarmac. By the time we spotted the wooden sign, half-hidden by elderflower and sheer Austrian indifference to strangers, I had already composed the complaint email in my head. Then we turned the final corner and I forgot to be annoyed.

The place sat there like it had grown out of the hillside rather than been built. Dark timber balconies, window boxes exploding with red geraniums, and a view down the valley that made me feel slightly emotional in a way I normally reserve for supermarket Christmas adverts. I stood in the gravel driveway with my suitcase still in the car, just staring, until a black cat wandered out from beneath the stairs and looked at me with the kind of judgment I usually get from my mother.

We had planned to unpack methodically, perhaps make a cup of tea, definitely find the WiFi password. Instead, within twenty minutes of arriving, we were lost. Properly lost. There is a path behind the property that the welcome folder describes as a "gentle woodland stroll." What it fails to mention is that this path forks approximately every forty metres, and that every fork looks identical to the last. We took what we believed was the scenic route to the village. It was scenic, certainly. It was also heading in entirely the wrong direction, towards a collection of farm buildings where an elderly gentleman was operating some machinery that I could not identify and did not wish to disturb.

My partner, who has never admitted to being lost in fifteen years of relationship, suggested we were "exploring." I suggested we were going to be eaten by something with antlers. We pressed on through pine forest that smelled like every expensive candle I have ever regretted buying, until the trees opened up and we found ourselves looking down on a chapel so small it could have been a garden shed with aspirations. No signpost had mentioned it. No blog post had photographed it. It simply existed, whitewashed and plain, with a wooden bench outside and a view that made my stomach flip.

We sat there for an hour. A woman appeared from somewhere, nodded at us without surprise, and disappeared again. I do not know where she came from or where she went. That became the pattern of the week.

The next morning, determined to be more organised, we set out with an actual paper map for the village proper. We found the village, bought excellent bread, and then took a wrong turn on the way back that led us to a waterfall nobody had told us about. It was not dramatic. It was not in any guidebook. It was simply water falling over rocks into a pool where someone had left a single plastic chair, facing the spray, as if they knew we would need it.

By day three we stopped fighting the getting lost. We would set out with vague intentions and see where the valley took us. A meadow full of harebells discovered because I needed to tie my shoelace. A dairy farm where we bought cheese from a teenager who spoke less English than our cat but communicated perfectly through gestures and pride. A viewpoint we reached by following a stream upward until the stream became the path and the path became an argument about whether we should turn back.

Each evening we returned to Trento with muddy boots and no photographs worth sharing, because the light was always wrong or my hands were full of wildflowers I had picked without thinking. The balcony became our confession booth. We would sit with whatever local wine we had found that day, watching the valley settle into evening, and admit to each other how rarely we let ourselves wander without purpose at home.

On our final morning I tried to find the little chapel again, to say goodbye I suppose, or to prove to myself that it had been real. I could not locate the path. The forest had rearranged itself, or I had, or perhaps some places simply refuse to be visited twice on purpose. I stood at the edge of the trees, slightly breathless from the climb, and laughed at myself for thinking I could plan a farewell to something that had never asked for my attention in the first place.

That is what Trento gave me, in the end. Not the comfortable beds or the excellent shower pressure or even the cheese, though I still think about that cheese. It gave me the gift of accidental discovery, of trusting wrong turns, of finding things I did not know enough to look for. I returned home with pine needles in my suitcase and a new tolerance for not knowing exactly where I am going, which is just as well, because I have never been good with directions and I am finally starting to see that as something other than a flaw.