I have never been so relieved to see a wooden beach house in my life, and that includes the time I mistook a public toilet block in Brighton for a boutique hotel. The drive to Marielyst had been straightforward enough - over from Copenhagen, across the Faro Bridges, then down through Falster's flat green landscape with its endless fields of yellow rapeseed. My partner had done the sensible thing and fallen asleep. I, meanwhile, had decided to "explore" a shortcut.

This is where I must confess something. I am pathologically incapable of following sat nav instructions when my gut tells me otherwise. My gut, incidentally, has the directional sense of a confused pigeon. Somewhere near Gedser, I took a wrong turn onto a gravel track that quickly became two sandy ruts through pine forest. The kind of track where you start calculating how embarrassing the rescue call would be. The pines got thicker. The ruts got sandier. My partner woke up, looked around with that particular expression, and said nothing. That silence was deafening.

Then suddenly the trees opened up. Not onto the holiday park I was aiming for, but onto something far better - a tiny, windswept beach I later learned the locals call their secret. Just a sliver of pale sand, a few weathered wooden posts where someone once moored boats, and the Baltic stretching out grey-green and glittering. We sat there for twenty minutes, sharing the emergency Twix from the glovebox, watching a lone swimmer in a wetsuit who looked like they knew something we didn't. I never found that spot again, though I tried twice. Some places seem to exist only as rewards for spectacular incompetence.

When we finally reached the Marielyst house - proper roads, actual signage, my dignity in tatters - the relief was immense. The place itself was exactly that comfortable Scandinavian simplicity you hope for. Light wood everywhere, a kitchen that made me want to cook things involving dill, and a terrace where you could sit with coffee and pretend you meant to get lost all along.

The next morning, determined to redeem myself, I set out on the bicycle that came with the house. Within half an hour I was lost again, this time in the network of paths behind the dunes. But here is the thing about Marielyst - getting lost is almost encouraged. I stumbled across a small freshwater lake, Hemmingske, hidden in the forest where no map seemed to mark it properly. A local woman was swimming there, and we chatted about how the tourists all crowd the main beach while this spot stays quiet. She told me about another place, a tiny harbour called Boto where fishermen still keep boats, and where you can buy smoked fish from a shed with no sign.

I found Boto the following day, though not without taking another wrong turn past a field of curious horses who followed me along a fence line like a silent judgement panel. The harbour was everything promised - just a few boats, a man mending nets, and that extraordinary smoked herring eaten on a wooden bench with fingers, because apparently that is the proper way and I was too embarrassed to ask for a fork.

By the end of the week, I stopped fighting my terrible sense of direction entirely. The best evening came from another accidental detour, finding a small clearing in the plantation where someone had built a simple wooden shelter and left firewood. We sat there as the light went, listening to the strange silence of pine forest near the sea, watching the sky turn that particular Baltic pink that seems to last forever.

I still cannot reliably find the main beach road in Marielyst. But I have learned that my worst quality as a navigator is perhaps my best quality as a holidaymaker. The planned things were lovely - the house, the cycling, the proper meals. But the unplanned things, the wrong turns and the sandy tracks and the unmarked harbours, those are what I will remember when I think of Falster. Some people travel with guidebooks and detailed itineraries. I travel with a terrible sense of direction and an emergency Twix. Somehow, it keeps working out better than it should.