I should have known the holiday proper started the moment I trusted Google Maps over my own common sense. There I was, bombing down what I generously call a farm track somewhere west of Gedser, convinced I was taking a shortcut to our Gedesby cottage. The sat nav had other ideas. It led me through a field gate, past some deeply unimpressed sheep, and deposited me at what appeared to be a tractor graveyard. My partner, who had been dozing, opened one eye and said, "Is this it, then?" Reader, it was not it.

We eventually found the proper road by following a man on a bicycle who looked like he'd been riding the same route since 1973. He didn't acknowledge us once, not even when I waved apologetically for the third time. Danish stoicism in action, I told myself, or perhaps he simply couldn't bear to make eye contact with someone who'd clearly just trespassed through agricultural land.

The cottage itself, when we finally arrived, was one of those traditional Falster timber places with weatherboarding the colour of honey gone slightly grainy. The key was in a lockbox that required the dexterity of a safecracker and the patience of a fisherman. I dropped the code twice. A neighbour watched from her window without curtains, which I initially found unsettling and later understood as simply practical. No point pretending you're not home when everyone knows you are.

By now it was half past four and the light was doing that extraordinary flat Scandinavian thing, where everything looks slightly overexposed and precious. We dumped our bags and did what any sensible person would do: went for a wander without purpose or map. This proved to be the making of the entire trip.

Gedesby itself is barely a village, more a scattering of houses and a church that sits at an angle suggesting either profound architectural confidence or geological mischief. We walked past it, meaning to loop back, and instead found ourselves on a path through low scrub that I now know leads to Bøtø Nor, though at the time I hadn't the faintest. The reeds were taller than me, rustling with hidden life, and the whole place smelled of salt and something greener, something I couldn't name.

We emerged onto a stretch of coast I cannot find on any map I've since consulted. The beach was shingle and coarse sand, with driftwood arranged by wind into accidental sculptures. No footprints but ours. Somewhere across the water, I supposed, lay Germany, though it felt abstract, theoretical. A seal watched us from a sandbank with the expression of someone who's seen this all before and found it mildly wanting.

The mishap of getting lost that morning had shaken something loose in me. I stopped trying to optimise the holiday, stopped checking my phone for the best rated this or the must-see that. We found a hollow in the dunes, sheltered from the wind, and simply sat. My partner produced cheese and slightly squashed bread from her coat pocket. We'd forgotten plates, obviously. We ate with our fingers and watched the light change, and I felt something I can only describe as the opposite of tourism.

On the walk back, we took another wrong turn and found a small harbour where someone was mending nets in the last of the daylight. He nodded, we nodded, and that was conversation enough. The Danish gift for comfortable silence, I thought, or perhaps just the universal language of people who have nowhere particular to be.

That evening, back at the cottage, I stood at the window with a cup of tea that was too hot and watched the darkness come on completely. Somewhere out there were all the things I'd planned to see, the proper attractions with opening hours and entrance fees. I couldn't remember what any of them were, and I found I didn't much mind.