I have never been so grateful for a wrong turn in my life. We had been driving from Svendborg for the best part of an hour, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who had briefly glanced at a map three days prior, when we missed the turning for Lohals entirely. The hire car bumped along a narrow farm track, hedgerows scratching at both wing mirrors, until we emerged in a tiny hamlet that Google Maps later refused to acknowledge existed.

"Brilliant," I muttered, executing a twelve-point turn while a local on a bicycle watched with the patient amusement of someone who had seen this exact scene a hundred times before. He pointed us back toward the main road, and twenty minutes later we finally spotted the wooden sign for our holiday home.

The mishap, though, set the tone for everything that followed. We arrived at the Lohals property in that particular state of mild delirium that comes from prolonged car confinement and navigational chaos, and promptly failed to locate the key safe. It was not by the front door, nor the back, nor anywhere logical. I found it eventually, wedged behind a rainwater butt round the side, after twenty minutes of increasingly theatrical searching that involved me crawling through a rhododendron bush and acquiring a respectable collection of scratches.

But stepping inside, the nonsense of the journey melted away. The place had that particular Scandinavian quality of being both spare and warm, wooden floors and white walls and enormous windows that framed the Baltic like a living painting. We dumped our bags and did what any sensible person would do: made terrible instant coffee and stood on the deck in silence, watching a heron work its way along the shoreline.

The real magic began the next morning, when we set out with vague intentions of finding breakfast supplies and immediately got lost again. The road to Lohals village took an unexpected fork, and we followed the wrong prong on instinct rather than sense. This is how we found the abandoned orchard, somewhere between nowhere and nowhere else, apple trees heavy with fruit and no house visible in any direction. We picked a bagful, feeling like naughty children, and ate them for days.

That accidental discovery rewired something in us. We stopped trusting the map entirely. On the coastal path north of the property, we wandered down an unmarked track that led to a tiny cove where someone had stacked driftwood into rough seating around a fire pit. We sat there for hours, watching the ferries pass between Langeland and Tasinge, speculating about who had built it and whether they minded our intrusion. No one appeared to object.

The finest accidental find came on our third day. We had cycled toward Bagenkop, missed a turning, and ended up on a gravel track through farmland that terminated at a small lake we never managed to name. An elderly man was fishing from a folding chair, his dog asleep beside him. He nodded at us without surprise, as if wrong-turners arrived daily, and pointed out a kingfisher darting across the water. We stayed until the light went, and he never asked our names, and we never learned his.

I have spent too many holidays ticking off recommended sights, photographing the same viewpoints as everyone else, returning with identical memories to a thousand strangers. This was different. Every meaningful moment came from error, from surrendering to uncertainty, from the particular joy of finding something that was not waiting to be found. The scratches from the rhododendron healed within the week. The sense that the best things require no planning, only willingness to be lost, has lasted considerably longer.