I have never been so pleased to see a petrol station in my entire life. There we were, three hours into what should have been a straightforward drive from Copenhagen Airport to our little holiday home in Marielyst, Falster, and I had just realised with the sinking feeling of a man who has ignored his wife's advice for the fourth time that morning that our fuel light had been glaring at me for the better part of forty minutes. The flat Danish countryside, which I had been admiring for its serene emptiness, suddenly felt less like picturesque farmland and more like a cruel joke played by the god of stubborn husbands.

The mishap set the tone, really. We limped into that petrol station like a scene from a bad sitcom, me trying to laugh it off while my partner maintained the dignified silence of someone who would be bringing this up for approximately the next decade. But here is the thing about getting properly lost in Falster - it is rather brilliant.

We had abandoned the main road in a fit of misplaced confidence, convinced that my phone's GPS was taking us the long way round. The long way round, it turns out, was actually the correct way round. Our shortcut deposited us somewhere near Gedser, which is not near Marielyst at all, despite what my internal compass had confidently asserted. But in that wrongness, we found something unexpectedly right.

Wandering down a narrow lane trying to turn round, we stumbled upon a tiny beach access point that I would never have found deliberately. No signpost, no car park, just a gap between two summer houses and a sandy path that led to the most extraordinary stretch of coastline. The Baltic lapped against the shore with that particular grey-green flatness it has on overcast days, and there was not another soul in sight. We stood there, wind-whipped and sheepish, and I felt that peculiar holiday magic that only arrives when plans dissolve.

Our actual holiday home, when we finally reached it, turned out to be one of those classic Danish summer houses - wooden, unpretentious, with that particular Scandinavian talent for making simplicity feel intentional rather than cheap. The sort of place where you notice the quality of light through the windows more than any decorative flourish. But I am getting ahead of myself, because the getting lost continued to deliver.

The following morning, determined to walk off my petrol station humiliation, I set out from the house with vague intentions of finding the local supermarket. I took a wrong turning almost immediately, as is my gift, and found myself in what I can only describe as a forest that should not have been there. The Bøtø Forest, I later learned, though at the time it felt like I had wandered into someone else's dream. Pine trees, sandy soil underfoot, and the most profound silence I have experienced outside of a library during exams.

I walked for perhaps an hour, increasingly convinced that I would need to be rescued by a kindly Dane with a bicycle, when I emerged onto a small lake I had never seen on any map. Bøtø Lake, apparently, though my discovery felt sufficiently personal that I briefly considered naming it after myself. A heron stood in the reeds, utterly unbothered by my intrusion. I sat on a fallen log and watched it for twenty minutes, thinking about nothing much at all, which is the particular luxury of holiday time that I never properly appreciate until I am accidentally granted it.

The supermarket, when I eventually found it, was profoundly ordinary. I bought milk and something called pålægschokolade which I had mistaken for biscuits and which turned out to be thin chocolate slices for bread. This is apparently a normal Danish thing. I ate them anyway, standing in that wooden kitchen with afternoon light coming through the windows, feeling absurdly pleased with my incompetence.

Marielyst itself, the actual village, we found almost by accident on our third day, having been distracted by beaches and forests and wrong turnings. It is small, unassuming, the sort of place that makes no particular effort to impress and is therefore genuinely charming. The harbour at Bøtø, a short cycle away, became our evening ritual - not because we planned it, but because we once took a wrong path on hired bicycles and found ourselves watching fishing boats return with the day's catch, the sky doing that spectacular Scandinavian sunset thing that makes you feel slightly emotional for no good reason.

I am not suggesting that getting lost is a deliberate strategy. The petrol station incident remains embarrassing. But there is something about Falster's flat, open landscape that makes wandering feel safe rather than foolish, that turns wrong turnings into discoveries rather than disasters. The place does not announce itself. It waits for you to stumble upon it, to find the unmarked path between houses, to take the lane that looks like it goes nowhere.

Our last evening, we cycled out to what we thought was the same harbour and somehow ended up at a completely different small cove, watching a local man launch a tiny boat with the practised efficiency of someone who has done this ten thousand times. He nodded at us. We nodded back. The sun went down. I thought about how I would never have found this spot with proper planning, how my spectacular unsuitability for navigation had become, against all expectation, the defining pleasure of the holiday.

We drove back to Copenhagen with a full tank of petrol and a slightly better sense of direction, though I would not stake anything significant on that. The chocolate slices for bread had become a strange addiction. My partner had, by the final day, almost stopped mentioning the petrol station. Some things, properly lost, stay found in ways you cannot anticipate.