I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I put "Marielyst, Falster" into my sat nav and it tried to send me to a petrol station outside Copenhagen. Three hours of increasingly tense driving through Zealand later, I finally crossed the Storstrom Bridge and promptly took the wrong exit, ending up down a gravel track surrounded by pine trees that looked identical in every direction. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The "I told you to download the offline maps" look. I had not downloaded the offline maps.

We were staying in one of those classic Danish summerhouses, the sort with wooden cladding and a deck that practically demands you sit on it with a cup of coffee. The NOVASOL listing had promised something cosy, and after reversing back up the gravel track with what I can only describe as agricultural language, we found it tucked behind a dune. But here is where it gets properly ridiculous. I was so flustered from getting lost that I walked straight past the actual front door and tried to enter through what turned out to be a garden shed. A very nice garden shed, admittedly, with matching wood panelling, but a shed nonetheless. My partner filmed the whole thing. It is on her phone still. She threatens to show people at parties.

The real discovery came the next morning. Determined to make up for my navigational failures, I set off on what I intended to be a brisk twenty-minute walk to the beach. I took a left where I should have taken a right, or possibly a right where I should have taken a left, and within ten minutes I was completely disoriented in the most wonderful way. The pine forests around Marielyst are crisscrossed with little paths that all look faintly official and yet lead absolutely nowhere predictable. I found myself in a clearing where someone had built an elaborate driftwood shelter, complete with a rough bench and a fire pit. No sign, no explanation, just this secret little camp sitting there as if it had grown out of the sand naturally. I sat on that bench for a good half hour, feeling smug about my accidental discovery, before realising I had no idea how to get back.

This became the pattern of the week. We would set out with modest intentions and end up somewhere utterly unexpected. A tiny lake, barely marked on any map, where we watched a heron stand completely motionless for what felt like an hour. A cycle path that deteriorated into a sandy track and then opened suddenly onto a stretch of beach with not another soul in sight. The main Marielyst beach is lovely in its bustling Danish way, all colourful striped windbreaks and serious swimming, but this accidental beach felt like it belonged only to us. We found sea holly growing in the dunes, these tough little silvery plants that look like they belong in a sci-fi film, and collected shells that I still have in a jar on my windowsill.

The local shop in Marielyst village became our anchor point. We would wander off in various wrong directions, get happily lost, and eventually navigate back by some combination of luck and the distant sound of the main road. The woman who ran it started recognising us, this pair of Brits who kept buying ice creams with slightly dazed expressions. On our fourth visit she asked, in perfect English, whether we were "exploring or just confused." I admitted it was probably equal measures of both. She laughed and drew us a little map on the back of a receipt, marking paths she said the tourists never found.

That receipt became precious. It led us to a small harbour I cannot properly name, where local fishermen kept traditional wooden boats painted in faded reds and blues. No gift shop, no cafe, just boats and water and a man mending nets who nodded at us without surprise, as if lost English people turned up there all the time. We sat on the harbour wall with pastries from a bakery we had stumbled across in yet another wrong turn, and watched the light change over the Baltic in that particular pale Danish way that makes everything feel calm and slightly melancholy at once.

I think what struck me most was how willing the landscape was to reward aimlessness. Back home I plan everything, spreadsheets for day trips, timed lunch reservations, the whole anxious choreography of modern leisure. In Falster I gave that up by necessity rather than choice, and found something better. Getting lost stopped being frightening and became a kind of practice, a way of paying attention differently. You notice more when you do not know where you are going. The particular sound of wind in pine needles. The way sand shifts colour from white to gold to grey depending on the angle of the dunes. The unexpected solidness of an old wooden post in the middle of nowhere, someone's boundary marker from decades past.

On our final evening we tried to find that driftwood shelter again, deliberately this time, and failed completely. Walked in circles for an hour before giving up and watching the sunset from a completely different spot that was, if anything, even better. My partner said something about it being fitting. I think she was right. Some things you only get to find once, and the not finding them again is part of what makes them matter.

We left with sand in our shoes, that jar of shells, and my partner's video of me trying to break into a garden shed. I have downloaded offline maps now, for whatever that is worth. I am not sure I will use them.