I should have trusted my gut when the sat-nav started insisting we take a left turn directly into a field of very unimpressed-looking sheep. Three hours out of Aalborg, already running late, and there I was arguing with a machine while my other half quietly ate the last of the road trip crisps in the passenger seat. The mishap? I'd confidently typed "Helligso Strand" without the slash through the o, which apparently convinced the technology we fancied a detour via someone's dairy farm. Forty minutes of increasingly narrow lanes later, we spotted an actual sign pointing toward Limfjorden, and I tried to play it off as intentional scenic routing.

The cottage revealed itself gradually, which felt fitting given how accidentally we'd arrived. You crest this modest rise and suddenly there's the fjord, flat and silver-grey, with the little cluster of wooden houses sitting just back from the pebbled shore like they've been caught gossiping. Ours had that particular weathered look that Scandinavian holiday places pull off without seeming neglected - the kind where you can't tell if the paint's deliberately muted or simply exhausted by decades of North Sea wind. I loved it immediately, though I kept this to myself given my recent navigational performance.

We dumped our bags with the chaotic energy of people who'd been in a car too long and went wandering before we'd properly unpacked. This proved to be the pattern of the whole trip, really. The first evening we simply walked left along the shore with no destination, which is how we found the tiny wooden jetty that someone had clearly built for private use but hadn't maintained in years. It jutted out at a slightly drunk angle, barnacled and magnificent, and we sat there watching oystercatchers work the shallows until the light went strange and pink. I'd brought proper walking shoes; my partner had not. She borrowed my socks and ruined them gloriously in the tidal mud. We still have those socks, stained beyond rescue, as some kind of strange souvenir.

The getting lost became deliberate after that. The second morning we took the lane behind the cottages instead of the coastal path, purely because a ginger cat looked like it knew something. It led us past a garden overflowing with white currants that nobody seemed to be harvesting, then through a gap in a hedge we absolutely shouldn't have fit through, and suddenly we were in this clearing with an abandoned rowing boat slowly becoming a flowerbed. Someone had been tending it, clearly, but not recently. Wild roses had colonised the seats. I took approximately seventy photos and not one captured the particular quality of stillness, the sense that we'd interrupted something private.

We never did find out who maintained that boat-garden. We asked at the little shop in Hvalpsund, a few miles along, and the woman there just smiled and said "ah, yes, that happens" which felt simultaneously informative and completely mysterious. The shop itself was another accident - we'd meant to find a supermarket and instead discovered this place selling nothing much beyond excellent rye bread, pickled herring in jars that looked vintage, and locally knitted woollen things. I bought a hat I didn't need. It was orange. I wear it constantly now and think of fjords.

The real discovery came on our fourth day, when we took the car with some vague intention of finding a proper beach and instead missed every turning. Limfjorden's coastline does this thing where inlets and peninsulas interrupt your progress, and before we knew it we were on a track barely wide enough for the vehicle, grazing through tall grass, convinced we'd end up requiring rescue. Then the track simply stopped at a tiny cove we'd never have found deliberately - maybe fifty metres of shingle, enclosed by low limestone cliffs, with the water so still it looked like you could walk across it. We stayed all afternoon, swimming in water that took serious commitment to enter, drying on rocks that smelled of seaweed and salt. No other person appeared. I read perhaps three pages of my book and spent the rest of the time just being there, which sounds pretentious and absolutely wasn't.

I keep thinking about that quality of accidental discovery, how none of the best moments were planned or researched or even particularly advisable. The jetty that might have collapsed under us. The hedge we squeezed through. The track we had no business driving. There's something about Helligso Strand and its surroundings that rewards this willingness to be slightly lost, to follow cats and ignore sensible footwear and trust that the fjord's complicated geography will reveal something worth the uncertainty. I arrived thinking I needed precision and itineraries, and left slightly converted to the theology of wrong turns. Though I still maintain the sat-nav's initial sheep-related suggestion was not wisdom but malfunction. Some accidents are genuinely just accidents. The trick is recognising which ones to follow anyway.