We nearly missed the ferry. Not because we were running late, but because I was absolutely convinced the departure was from Ystad when it was actually from Sassnitz. My partner, bless her patience, realised my error roughly forty minutes before we were due to sail, which led to a frantic drive across southern Sweden with me muttering apologies and her navigating with the sort of calm that only comes from years of putting up with my geographical confidence.

By the time we reached Bornholm, I was ready for something to go right. And it did, the moment we turned onto the gravel track leading to Sandkas. The cottage sat tucked among pines near Balka Strand, looking like something from a children's illustration - all weathered wood and terracotta roof tiles, with a garden that had clearly given up on formal gardening and gone feral in the most charming way possible.

I had planned our entire first day. Museums, the round church at Nylars, a carefully researched lunch spot. None of it happened. Instead, within ten minutes of arriving, I managed to lock us out while fetching firewood. The spare key was apparently "somewhere obvious" according to the property notes I'd skimmed. It was not obvious. Not to me, anyway. My partner found it beneath a flowerpot shaped like a hedgehog, which I maintain was camouflaged by actual hedgehog-like garden debris.

This set the tone. We gave up on plans and started wandering.

The real Bornholm revealed itself in the gaps between intentions. A path behind the cottage, barely marked, led through birch scrub to a hollow where someone had arranged driftwood into rough seating around a fire pit. No sign explained it. No Instagram geotag proclaimed its existence. We sat there that evening with supermarket wine and watched the light fade through the trees, feeling like we'd stumbled into a secret.

The next morning, determined to reach Balka Strand properly, we took a wrong turning almost immediately. The lane narrowed to a track, then to something that was definitely just two wheel ruts through heather. We were about to turn back when we spotted a wooden gate with a hand-painted sign: "Honning." Honey. An elderly woman appeared from a shed before we could retreat, and ten minutes later we were walking away with a jar of heather honey and directions that involved "past the rock that looks like a sleeping man" and "where the old tractor died."

We never found the tractor. We did, however, find a cove so small it didn't appear on our map, where fishing boats were pulled up on shingle and an old man was mending nets with movements so practised they looked meditative. He didn't speak English; our Danish extends barely past "tak" and "øl." We communicated in nods and gestures, and he showed us how to open sea buckthorn berries without staining everything orange. I immediately stained everything orange.

By day three, getting lost had become our methodology. We abandoned the car entirely and cycled aimlessly, following lanes that seemed to promise nothing and delivering everything: an orchard where you could pick your own apples and pay into an honesty box; a clearing where someone had installed a single weather-beaten bench facing a view of fields rolling down to the sea; a stream where we paddled and disturbed a heron that rose with an indignant squawk.

The round church remained unvisited. The carefully researched lunch spot stayed researched but not experienced. Instead, we ate rye bread and smoked fish from a village shop whose owner told us about the time a storm washed a portaloo into his garden from a campsite three kilometres away. Some stories don't make guidebooks.

On our final evening, we found ourselves back at that driftwood fire pit. I built a small fire with excessive concentration, still slightly traumatised by the locked-out incident. My partner laughed at something, I don't remember what, and I realised that my carefully planned holiday would have been perfectly pleasant and entirely forgettable. The wrong turnings had given us something better: the particular intimacy of places discovered rather than directed to, the stories that come from mild confusion rather than smooth execution.

We left the next morning with sand in our shoes, honey in our luggage, and a photograph of a rock that only vaguely resembled a sleeping man. I still don't know where that old tractor is. I'm not sure I want to. Some mysteries are worth keeping.