I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Hjarbaek Fjord did not disappoint. We had been driving up through Jutland for what felt like most of eternity, the Sat Nav cheerfully announcing Danish place names with the confidence of someone who had definitely made them up on the spot. My partner was navigating, which meant holding the phone at an angle that suggested modern art rather than practical usefulness. Somewhere between Viborg and complete bewilderment, we missed our turning and found ourselves on a narrow lane between two fields of barley that stretched to every horizon.

"This is fine," I announced, in the tone of someone who knew it was not fine.

The lane became a track. The track became a suggestion. Then, with a grinding noise that still haunts my dreams, the bottom of our hire car kissed a particularly optimistic rock. We stopped. I got out. Three sheep looked at me with the blank contempt sheep have perfected over millennia.

What happened next was either luck or the universe compensating us for my terrible directional instincts. A man appeared from a farmhouse, riding what I can only describe as a bicycle that had seen the Second World War and formed opinions about it. He spoke no English. I speak Danish that extends barely beyond "tak" and the name of a popular pastry. Between us, through gestures that would have embarrassed a mime, we established that we were idiots but essentially harmless. He pointed. We reversed. Ten minutes later we emerged onto a road that actually appeared on maps, and there was the fjord, suddenly, like a secret someone had forgotten to keep.

Hjarbaek Fjord reveals itself gradually, which is its particular charm. The holiday house sat back from the water, modest and unassuming, with windows that caught the light in the late afternoon and held onto it like something precious. But we did not go straight in. We were too busy being lost still, wandering down to a small wooden jetty that had not featured in any of our research, where an elderly man was untangling fishing line with the patience of a saint dealing with a particularly trying miracle.

He told us, in broken English and generous spirit, about the swimming spot behind the old boat shed. "No tourists," he said, with evident satisfaction. We found it the next morning by following a path that started purposefully and then apparently changed its mind, becoming a thread through reeds and wildflowers that brushed our knees. The water there was still and brown-green, not pretty in the conventional sense, but perfect. We swam in our clothes because we had not brought costumes, and emerged smelling of pondweed and ridiculous happiness.

The fjord's edges are where its character lives. We discovered a smokehouse by accident, having taken a wrong turn on a borrowed bicycle and ended up on a gravel track that seemed to lead nowhere until it suddenly led somewhere very specific indeed. The owner, a woman whose hands smelled permanently of herring and who seemed genuinely surprised to see customers, sold us rye bread and smoked fish that we ate sitting on a overturned boat, watching the water do nothing in particular with tremendous dedication.

On our third day, we got properly lost. I mean this as a deliberate choice, leaving the house with no destination, taking the smallest roads we could find, the ones with grass growing up the middle. We found a church, locked, from the twelfth century, with runic graffiti carved into the porch by Vikings who had apparently been waiting for the service to start and got bored. We found a beach of sorts, mud and stones and the bleached skeleton of a tree, where we sat for an hour and saw no one. We found a farm shop selling honey from hives we could see in the next field, the owner trusting enough to leave a tin for money on an honour system that would have lasted approximately four minutes anywhere I have ever lived.

Each evening we returned to the house sun-touched and slightly confused, carrying things we had not intended to find. The fjord does not announce itself with grandeur. It accumulates. By the end of our week, I realised I could not describe the place properly to anyone who had not been there. It is not the dramatic Denmark of postcards. It is something better: the Denmark of getting things slightly wrong and being rewarded for it, of narrow lanes that become adventures, of water that holds its secrets until you stop trying to find them and simply let yourself be found.

We left eventually, as one must. The Sat Nav worked perfectly on the return journey, which felt almost like an insult. I find I do not remember the house so much as the moments around it, the accidental discoveries, the kindness of strangers to idiots in hire cars. I think sometimes about that first wrong turn, the grinding rock, the contemptuous sheep. Best mistake I have made in years.