I should have known the holiday was going to be character-building when I missed the turning for Kramnitze not once but three times. There I was, trundling through Lolland in a hire car the size of a small boat, convinced my sat nav had developed a personal vendetta against me. The third time I found myself staring at a field of particularly judgmental-looking cows, I finally accepted that Danish country roads operate on their own mysterious logic.

The property itself, when I eventually located it, sat tucked among trees with that satisfying sense of having discovered something properly hidden. My host had mentioned in her brief message that the key would be "obvious." It was not. I spent a good ten minutes patting down plant pots and peering under welcome mats before spotting it dangling inside a birdhouse, which felt both charming and faintly mocking. I was too relieved to be annoyed.

That first evening, I did not bother with plans. I simply walked. The lane behind the property petered out into a rough track within minutes, and I followed it half-expecting to hit a dead end. Instead I stumbled onto a small beach I later learned had no official name, just a curve of pebbles where someone had dragged an old rowing boat high above the tide line and left it to silver in the weather. I sat on it until the light went strange and golden, feeling like I had trespassed into someone else's private memory.

The next morning I set out deliberately to get lost, which is not something I would have admitted to myself six months ago. I have always been the person with the spreadsheet itinerary, the pre-booked restaurant slots, the mild anxiety about wasted time. But Lolland does not really accommodate that energy. I took a left where I should have taken a right, found a cycle path that turned into a forest trail, and emerged somewhere near what I think was Hummingen though the map on my phone had given up in disgust.

There was a shed. That is the only honest description. A wooden shed with a hand-painted sign offering fresh eggs and honesty-box strawberries. I left more kroner than necessary out of sheer gratitude. The strawberries were warm from the sun and tasted like something from before industrial agriculture. I ate the entire punnet sitting on a tree stump, juice staining my fingers, watching a tractor move across a distant field with the unhurried pace of a creature that knows exactly where it belongs.

I found my way back to Kramnitze eventually, though I took a different wrong turning that deposited me at a small harbour where three men were repairing nets in companionable silence. They nodded at me. I nodded back. No one attempted conversation, which suited us all.

By my final day, I had stopped trying to name or categorise where I ended up. There was the pond I circled twice because the path simply refused to go anywhere else. The overgrown churchyard with headstones so weathered the dates had softened into suggestion. The field where I startled a hare and stood frozen while it decided whether I constituted a threat worth fleeing.

I never did learn the proper names of most places I found. They exist now only in my own private geography: the Boat Beach, the Egg Shed, the Hare Field. This is perhaps the real gift of getting properly lost. You stop being a tourist collecting locations and become something more accidental, more temporary, more honest.

I left the key in the birdhouse as instructed. Drove away still without understanding the road layout. Already plotting which turning I might take next time, and what unexpected thing might be waiting when I did.