Getting to Mommark should have been straightforward, but I managed to turn a simple ferry crossing into something of a palaver. I'd been so smug about booking a traditional Danish summer house on Als, picturing myself gliding onto the island like a seasoned Scandinavian traveller. Instead, I missed the Soby ferry by approximately ninety seconds, watched it chug away without me, and spent forty minutes in a lay-by eating a squashed sandwich and questioning my life choices.

By the time I finally rolled up to the little cluster of holiday homes near Mommark harbour, I was in that peculiar state of frazzled determination that makes everything either hilarious or deeply irritating. The house itself immediately tipped me towards the former. Bright red wooden cladding, a proper thatched roof, and a garden that looked like it had been arranged by someone who genuinely understood hygge rather than just reading about it in a magazine. I stood there with my car door still open, just staring at the thing, feeling rather like I'd stumbled into a particularly wholesome children's programme.

The mishap had put me hours behind schedule, so my planned afternoon of organised sightseeing went straight out the window. This turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. Rather than ticking off attractions with military precision, I simply wandered. Mommark itself is tiny, barely more than a handful of houses and a working harbour where local fishermen still land their catch. I found myself down by the water as the light started to turn golden, watching a man mend nets with the kind of concentration that made me feel embarrassed about how often I check my phone.

The next morning I set out with absolutely no plan, which for someone who colour-codes their calendar felt almost transgressive. I took the coastal path north, assuming I'd walk for half an hour and turn back. Three hours later I was still going, having discovered a series of tiny coves that don't appear on any tourist map I could find. At one point the path seemed to disappear entirely into dense birch scrub, and I had that momentary panic of the committed wanderer who won't admit they're lost. I pushed through anyway and found myself on a miniature beach, maybe twenty metres of sand, with an abandoned wooden rowing boat slowly becoming one with the shoreline vegetation. I sat on a rock and ate the remains of my travel sandwich, feeling genuinely pleased with myself for the first time in months.

Getting properly lost on the way back led me to a small apple orchard behind what I initially thought was an abandoned farmhouse. An elderly woman appeared from nowhere, apparently unsurprised to find a dishevelled Englishman in her field, and insisted I take a bag of windfalls. We communicated in that wonderful mixture of gestures, broken Danish on my part, and her surprisingly robust English. She pointed me towards a path I'd completely missed, which brought me out exactly where I'd started.

That evening I cooked nothing more ambitious than pasta with tinned tomatoes, ate it on the house's little wooden terrace, and watched the harbour lights come on across the water. The ferry mishap that had seemed so catastrophic two days earlier now felt like a necessary nudge towards something better. I'd arrived planning to see Denmark efficiently. Instead, I'd accidentally found something far more valuable: the particular magic of not quite knowing where you're going, and being perfectly content with that.