The thing about driving to East Jutland is that you convince yourself Denmark is basically flat and therefore impossible to get lost in. This is, I can now confirm, complete nonsense.

We had been on the road for four hours, having caught the ferry to Esbjerg and pointed our tired Volvo eastward with the sort of blind optimism that comes from too much motorway coffee. The sat nav had given up somewhere near Vejle, possibly out of spite, and my partner was navigating using a screenshot of directions taken three days prior. "Turn left at the big tree," she announced, as if this were helpful in a country that specialises in big trees.

The mishap came at a roundabout outside Juelsminde. I took what I believed to be the third exit. It was, in fact, the same entrance I had just come from, executed with such commitment that a local cyclist actually stopped to watch. We did two full circuits before I admitted defeat and pulled onto the verge to let a tractor pass. My partner said nothing. She just opened the window and took a very long, very pointed breath of sea air.

And that, weirdly, is how we found it.

Not Draby Strand itself - we eventually located that through actual directions from a woman in a petrol station who drew us a map on a receipt. No, I mean the little wooden sign half-hidden by cow parsley, pointing down a rutted track toward something called "Bøgeskov Strand." We had time. We had embarrassment to walk off. We turned.

The track became a path, the path became sand, and suddenly we were standing on a crescent of beach that clearly belonged to nobody but the oystercatchers. No ice cream hut, no lifeguard tower, just damp sand and the smell of brackish water and something faintly agricultural from the fields behind. My partner, who had been maintaining a dignified silence since the roundabout incident, actually laughed. "We'd never have found this on purpose," she said, and she was right.

Draby Strand itself, when we finally arrived, turned out to be a proper little cluster of wooden holiday homes tucked between farmland and coastline. Ours had that particular Scandinavian competence to it - everything worked, everything was where you expected, and the kettle boiled with a speed that felt almost aggressive after years of British electrics. But I kept thinking about that accidental beach.

The next morning we set out with no particular plan beyond "see what happens." This is not my natural mode. I am a person who reads restaurant reviews. I check opening hours. I have been known to create spreadsheets for city breaks. But Juelsminde was close enough to wander toward, and wander we did, taking a path that looked coastal on the map but quickly became something else entirely.

We found a harbour where someone was mending nets in the old Danish fashion, fingers moving faster than I could follow. We found a bakery that appeared to exist only for locals, selling something called brunsviger that I can only describe as cinnamon's more interesting cousin. We found ourselves, at one point, in a churchyard with graves dating to the 1600s, reading names we couldn't pronounce while bees worked the linden trees overhead.

Each time we thought we were lost, we found something better than what we'd been looking for.

There was the afternoon we took a wrong turning on a borrowed bicycle and ended up at a farm shop selling strawberries still warm from the polytunnel. The evening we followed what we thought was a footpath and discovered it was actually a private drive, leading to an awkward conversation with a Dane who was so determined to be polite about our trespassing that he insisted we stay for coffee. The morning we paddled from our own little beach and found the current had carried us sideways to a rocky outcrop where seals, actual seals, watched us with the resigned expression of creatures who have seen many incompetent humans.

I kept waiting to feel anxious about the lack of plan. It never quite happened.

On our final day, we tried to find that first accidental beach again. Failed completely. Took three different wrong turns and ended up at a nature reserve we'd never heard of, watching marsh harriers quarter the reeds while midges discovered our ankles. My partner looked at me. "Shall we stop trying to find things on purpose?" she asked.

I think that might be the lesson I'm slowly absorbing, between the flat Danish light and the endless, surprising horizons. The roundabout was humiliating. The getting lost was occasionally uncomfortable. But the things we stumbled into - the net-mender, the strawberry farm, the seals with their judging eyes - those belonged to us in a way that no tick-box sightseeing ever could.

We left Draby Strand with sand in the car and no photographs worth showing anyone. I have never been more satisfied with a holiday.