The thing about driving to a place called Spodsbjerg is that you keep expecting to have arrived already, and then you haven't. We'd been winding through Langeland for what felt like hours, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who'd glanced at a map once in a service station, when I spotted a sign for Tasinge and somehow convinced myself we'd gone wrong. We hadn't, as it turned out, but that didn't stop me executing a dramatic three-point turn in a farm entrance, directly into a ditch full of what I desperately hoped was mud.

It wasn't mud. The farmer who pulled us out with his tractor was far too polite to mention the smell, though his Labrador had no such inhibitions and spent a good five minutes investigating my shoes with the enthusiasm of a connoisseur. We arrived at the cottage with me insisting I couldn't possibly enter until I'd hosed myself down, only to discover the outdoor shower was colder than the North Sea and approximately as forgiving.

But here's the thing about Spodsbjerg, and about Langeland generally: it doesn't care about your dignity. The cottage sat there all whitewashed and unbothered, red roof glowing in the late sun, surrounded by grass that actually looked like someone had rolled it out fresh that morning. I stood there dripping and slightly humiliated and thought, well, this'll do nicely.

We'd planned to visit Rudkoebing the next day, properly, with a list. Instead we got lost within twenty minutes of setting out, took a wrong turn at what I'm fairly certain was the same junction three times, and ended up on a track that dissolved into a field of barley. We abandoned the car and walked, which is how we found the beach. Not the popular one, not the one with facilities and ice cream. This was a sliver of sand and pebbles tucked between low cliffs, accessible only by a path that looked like it had been made by determined sheep. We had it entirely to ourselves for three hours, watching oystercatchers work the shoreline and discovering that the water, while not exactly Mediterranean, had that particular Scandinavian clarity that makes you feel cleaner just looking at it.

The getting lost became the whole holiday, really. We'd set out with vague intentions and reliably fail to achieve them, stumbling instead into something better. A bakery in Humble that we'd never have found deliberately, where the woman behind the counter spoke no English and we communicated entirely through pointing and enthusiastic nodding, walking out with pastries we couldn't name and absolutely couldn't stop eating. A harbour where someone was mending nets in a shed that smelled of tar and salt, who showed us his grandfather's tools and seemed genuinely delighted by our terrible Danish pronunciation.

On our last morning, I woke early and wandered down to the water without really thinking about direction. Found myself on a small rise overlooking the Sound, the bridge to Tasinge visible in the distance, everything still and grey and impossibly peaceful. I thought about all the places I'd planned to see, the efficient holiday I'd imagined, and laughed out loud at how thoroughly I'd failed at all of it. The mud, the wrong turns, the pastries we couldn't name: that was the trip. That was the point.

We left the keys on the table and drove away slowly, deliberately taking the longer route, hoping to get lost one more time.