I have never been so relieved to see a wind turbine in my life. Three hours into our drive from Copenhagen, my partner and I realised I had been confidently navigating us towards Kramnitze using the postcode for a completely different island. We were meant to be in Lolland, not Langeland. The giveaway was the bridge. The wrong bridge. The very expensive, very wrong bridge.

By the time we corrected course and rattled down the final stretch of Danish country road, our hire car smelled of petrol station coffee and quiet resentment. Then the trees parted and there it was: our little wooden holiday home, tucked among birch trees with the Baltic glinting through gaps in the foliage. I braced for smugness from my partner. Instead, she was already out of the car, pointing at a deer that was watching us from the garden fence with the bored expression of someone who had seen this exact scene a hundred times before.

The key was in a lockbox, which I fumbled with for an embarrassing length of time. Inside, the place smelled of pine and something faintly maritime, like someone had opened all the windows during a storm and never quite closed them. The kitchen was compact in that practical Scandinavian way where everything has exactly one purpose and one drawer. I immediately loved it. We dumped our bags and did what any sensible person would do: wandered off without a map.

This was how we found the beach path, or rather, how the beach path found us. We took what I insisted was a shortcut through some trees behind the property and emerged onto a stretch of sand so empty I actually checked my phone to confirm it was a Saturday. The water was that particular Baltic grey-green that looks uninviting until you wade in and discover it is merely refreshingly indifferent. A woman was walking her dog in the distance. That was it for human presence. We sat on a piece of driftwood and watched a heron stand completely still in the shallows, apparently waiting for something we could not see.

Hunger drove us back, but we got lost again almost immediately. The trees looked different in reverse. We stumbled onto a narrow lane between two fields where an elderly man was repairing a fence. He spoke no English, I speak barely any Danish, but through pointing and enthusiastic nodding we established that we were idiots and he was amused. He gestured us down a track I would never have noticed, which brought us out behind a small farm shop we had driven past twice without seeing. They sold smoked fish, new potatoes, and something the woman behind the counter described as "traditional" with a shrug that suggested even she was not entirely convinced. We bought all of it.

That evening, we cooked badly on the unfamiliar hob, ate on the little wooden deck as the light went soft and long, and listened to nothing much at all. Somewhere out there was the proper tourist trail, the signed attractions, the sensible route. We had missed all of it, twice, by accident. I would not have changed a single wrong turn.