I should have known the holiday proper had begun when I trusted Google Maps over my own common sense. There I was, winding through Odsherred's lanes with a boot full of supermarket provisions and a passenger seat stacked with guidebooks I'd never open, convinced I was minutes from Gudmindrup Strand. The sat nav had other ideas. It deposited me at what I can only describe as a very aggressive duck pond, complete with one particular mallard who seemed personally offended by my presence. I sat there, engine running, wondering if this counted as a hidden gem or merely humiliation.

Turns out, it was a bit of both.

The proper route revealed itself eventually, as these things do when you swallow your pride and ask a passing cyclist. But that wrong turn set the tone for the whole week. I stopped fighting the map and started following my nose instead, which is how I discovered the real Odsherred. Not the one in the brochures, but the one that hides down gravel tracks and behind unmarked hedgerows.

Gudmindrup Strand itself was lovely, of course. The sort of wide, pale beach where Danish families set up elaborate camp kitchens and small children chase each other with shrimping nets. I spent my first morning there doing the obvious things: paddling, attempting to read a novel, getting sand absolutely everywhere. But by afternoon I was restless, and that's when the accidental discoveries began.

I took a path I thought led to the car park and ended up in someone's garden. Embarrassing, yes, but the someone turned out to be an elderly chap called Erik who was pruning roses and seemed entirely unbothered by my intrusion. He pointed me toward what he called "the proper path to the lake" - meaning Gudmindrup So, which I'd never heard mentioned in any of my hasty research. I found it ten minutes later through a gap in the birch trees, a stretch of still water surrounded by reeds and the occasional heron standing about looking important. No signs, no car park, no other people. Just me and the midges and a profound sense of having stumbled into somewhere I shouldn't know about.

The next day I got properly lost, if lost is the word for it. I was cycling toward what I believed was Nykobing Sjaelland and somehow circled back through farmland, ending up at a tiny harbour I'd never marked on any map. Dragsholm turned out to be the name, though there was nobody to ask and I only confirmed this later. A handful of wooden boats, a shed selling smoked fish on honour-system pricing, and a bench where I sat eating my packed lunch like I'd planned it all along. The fish seller appeared eventually, a woman called Lene who told me most visitors whiz past on the main road, never knowing this pocket of calm exists. I bought more herring than I could reasonably eat and cycled home feeling smug as anything.

My favourite accidental find came on my last morning. I'd set out for a final beach walk and took a turning that looked familiar but absolutely wasn't. This led me through pine woods that smelled of resin and summer heat, emerging suddenly at a clearing where someone had built a tiny shelter from driftwood and old pallets. Inside: a guestbook, a box of matches, a note saying "light the candle if you stay." I didn't stay - I had a ferry to miss, inevitably, because I'd lost track of time again. But I lit the candle anyway, wrote something embarrassingly earnest in the book, and sat for twenty minutes listening to nothing much at all.

I never did find that shelter again, though I looked on my next visit. Perhaps I imagined it, or perhaps Odsherred simply gives up its secrets reluctantly, one wrong turn at a time. Either way, I've stopped trusting the map entirely. The duck pond, for what it's worth, remains exactly where I left it.