I should have known the holiday proper had begun when my phone decided the Maribo turn-off was merely a suggestion. There I was, cheerfully following what I assumed was a scenic route, watching tarmac become gravel become what I can only describe as a farm track with aspirations. The sat nav gave up entirely somewhere between a field of very judgmental cows and a barn that looked like it had seen better centuries. I had planned to arrive at Kongsnæs in time for a civilised lunch. Instead, I pulled up at quarter past three with a car full of crisps crumbs and the haunted expression of a man who has been aggressively tutted at by Danish sheep.

The cottage itself, when I finally found it, sat tucked among trees with that particular Scandinavian talent for looking both modest and smug about it. White clapboard, red trim, the whole hygge handbook. I stood on the gravel drive, still slightly vibrating from my unintended tour of Falster's agricultural hinterland, and felt the particular shame of the lost Englishman. You tell yourself you are spontaneous, a wanderer. The reality is you missed a sign, probably quite a large one, and spent forty minutes circling a village whose name you still cannot pronounce.

What saved me, and what became the unexpected gift of that first afternoon, was my stubborn refusal to admit defeat. Rather than collapse indoors with the wine I had definitely earned, I went for what I told myself was a restorative walk. The path behind the cottage led down toward the water, though "path" is generous. It was more a suggestion of compressed grass that petered out into reeds, then somehow emerged again as a narrow strip along the shore. I had no map, no signal, and absolutely no plan beyond moving forward until embarrassment subsided.

That is how I found the little cove. I cannot call it a beach; it was perhaps fifteen metres of coarse sand and flat stones, sheltered by overhanging willows that trailed into the water like fingers testing temperature. No signage pointed to it, no path properly reached it. I only stumbled upon it because I was following what I thought might be a trail and turned out to be a deer run. A heron lifted off as I approached, that prehistoric ungainliness of flight, and I stood there with my ridiculous walking shoes and my still-rattled nerves and felt something shift. The panic of being lost had become something else entirely. Permission, perhaps.

I sat on a rock that was probably someone's garden boundary once, judging by the moss-covered wall fragment nearby, and watched the light change across the water. Maribo would be that way, I supposed, or possibly not. I had lost all reliable sense of direction. A family of mute swans passed, the cygnets still grey and ungainly, and I realised I was grinning like an idiot at nothing in particular.

The walk back took longer because I refused to retrace my steps, determined to find some alternative route that would restore my sense of competence. This led me through a stand of birch where someone had long ago abandoned a rowboat, now filled with leaf litter and the determined saplings of self-set trees. It brought me past a clearing where an ancient apple tree, clearly once part of an orchard, still bore fruit that no one gathered. Each wrong turning revealed something I would never have found deliberately. A wooden bench facing nothing but reeds, positioned with the particular Danish confidence that someone, someday, would appreciate the view. A concrete bunker, Second World War vintage I supposed, softened by decades of ivy into something almost picturesque.

By the time I emerged onto a proper lane, recognisably near the cottage, the light had gone golden and my legs ached pleasantly. I passed a woman walking her dog who nodded without surprise, as if Englishmen regularly materialised from hedgerows in late afternoon. I nodded back with what I hoped was worldly nonchalance, though I suspect I looked more like someone who had been mildly concussed by nature.

That evening, I cooked badly with the supplies I had brought, drank more wine than planned, and sat on the small terrace watching darkness settle. The mishap of my arrival, the stubbornness that sent me walking without purpose, the accidental discoveries of that first afternoon - they had established something I could not have planned. The cottage was comfortable, well-equipped, exactly as advertised. But the cove, the boat-tree, the bench facing reeds - these were mine because I had got lost, because I had refused to admit it, because I had kept moving without knowing where I was going.

I have never been good at getting lost. I suspect most of us are not. We treat it as failure, as something to correct with technology or determination. But Falster, that first day, taught me something I keep returning to. The places you find by accident, the spots no brochure mentions, the moments when your own foolishness becomes the doorway to something unexpected - these are the ones that stay. I went back to that cove twice more during my stay, always by the same unreliable route, always with the same slight uncertainty about whether I would find it again. I always did, though I am still not entirely certain how.

The sat nav worked perfectly on the journey home. I found it rather disappointing.