Getting to Lavensby on the island of Als involved a ferry crossing that I immediately bungled, turning up at the wrong terminal in Bojden and having to backtrack through lanes so narrow I was practically brushing hedgerows with both wing mirrors. My partner sat there with that particular expression of British restraint, the one that says "I shall not comment" while radiating judgment. We made the next sailing with minutes to spare, me flustered and overspeeding through a village whose name I still cannot pronounce.

The Lavensby itself appeared down an unmarked track I nearly missed twice, a proper Danish summer house tucked among birch trees with red wooden cladding that had softened to the colour of old bricks. I had expected something smarter, somehow, based on the photographs. What we found was better: slightly weathered, thoroughly unpretentious, with a deck that listed just enough to make you pay attention when carrying wine glasses. The key was in a lockbox with a code I misremembered, resulting in me trying three variations while a neighbour watched from his garden with the patient amusement of someone who has seen this ritual many times.

We dumped our bags and did what I always promise I will not do: headed out with only vague intentions and no proper map. This is how we found the abandoned orchard, ten minutes walk east down a lane that petered out into grass. Someone had once cultivated apples there with serious purpose; now the trees grew wild and heavy, dropping fruit to ferment on the ground in a smell of sweet decay that attracted wasps and, apparently, an elderly Danish woman with a canvas bag. She did not speak English, I do not speak Danish, yet through pointing and gestures she communicated that the small yellow apples were "for juice, not eating" and that we were welcome to take what we wanted. We filled our pockets and ate them anyway, juice apples proving perfectly adequate for wandering consumption.

Getting properly lost took longer than expected, Als being only so large. We managed it by following a path from Lavensby Strand that seemed coastal but gradually turned inland through meadows where cattle watched us with that disconcerting stillness particular to Danish livestock. The path forked, forked again, then dissolved into a field of something I initially took for wheat but was apparently rye, tall enough to obscure landmarks. My phone had signal but the mapping application showed only grey where detail should be, some digital admission of defeat.

We emerged eventually at a small harbour I cannot name, not through any effort of navigation but because the rye field simply ended at a dyke, and the dyke led to water. Three men were repairing a boat in a shed that smelled of tar and something marine and ancient. They offered coffee from a thermos without speaking, accepting our presence as unremarkable, and we sat on upturned crates watching gulls argue over scraps while the afternoon turned golden. I do not know the name of this harbour. I could not find it again if I tried, which is precisely why it stays with me.

The return to Lavensby took two hours by lanes I am certain we had not walked before, past a church with a turf roof being repaired by someone standing on it with a spade, past a farmhouse selling eggs on honour-system honesty, past a pond where someone had abandoned a child's pedal car now colonised by frogs. We arrived after dark, pocket-apples long finished, slightly sunburned, thoroughly confused about where we had been.

That evening on the listing deck, drinking wine carefully, I found myself reflecting on how much of my planned travelling involves checking items off lists I did not consciously write. The wrong ferry terminal, the failed map, the path that disappeared: these had delivered something the guidebooks could not have prepared me for, not because it was dramatic but because it was specifically, accidentally mine. The elderly woman and her juice apples. The harbour without a name. The man with his spade on a turf roof, waving as we passed though we had not spoken.

I still do not know precisely where we walked that afternoon. The Lavensby remained, solid and red and slightly tilting, waiting with the patience of holiday homes everywhere for guests to return from their misadventures. We went back twice more during our stay, deliberately seeking wrong turns, deliberately losing the path. We never found that harbour again, which seems exactly right.