I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up driving our hire car down what I can only describe as a glorified tractor path somewhere west of Esbjerg, convinced I was taking a shortcut to Blavand Strand. The sat nav had given up on me around the same time my partner stopped answering my questions about whether this looked right. Three sheep stared at us with what I can only call professional judgement. I wound down the window to ask a farmer for help, only to discover I had forgotten every useful Danish word I had painstakingly learned. "Tak?" I offered weakly. He pointed back the way we came. We arrived at the holiday home two hours late, covered in the specific dust that only comes from very wrong rural roads, and I have never been more grateful to see a proper gravel driveway in my life.

The place itself was worth every sheep-related humiliation. A proper wooden cottage tucked into the dunes, the sort that makes you feel like you have stumbled into a Scandi crime drama except nobody has been murdered and the lighting is much more flattering. My partner went straight for the coffee machine while I stood on the deck, still brushing dust off my trousers, and watched the light do that particular flat coastal thing it does in West Jutland. Everything feels wide there. The sky, the beaches, the spaces between things. I grew up in the Midlands where horizons are basically a rumour, so this felt almost indecent.

We had planned to do proper tourist things the next morning. The lighthouse, maybe. The Tirpitz Museum, which everyone recommends. Instead we got lost again, this time on foot, wandering down a path behind the cottage that looked like it went somewhere definite but absolutely did not. I am making this sound like a complaint. It was not. The path petered out into marram grass and then suddenly there was this tiny cove, barely a beach really, just a scoop of sand between two low headlands. No signs, no access road, no other people. Just a few weathered wooden posts where someone had once tried to moor something smaller than optimistic. We sat there for two hours. I found a piece of sea glass the colour of weak tea and decided it was the best thing I had ever found.

That set the pattern without us meaning it to. We stopped trying to get anywhere properly. The second morning I took a wrong turn on what I thought was the coastal path and ended up in a small wood of stunted oak trees, the kind shaped by wind into permanent gestures of complaint. There was a clearing with a single bench, homemade looking, with someone's initials carved deep and a view through to the sea that felt almost accidentally perfect. I sat there longer than I intended, thinking about nothing much, which is a skill I have lost somewhere between my twenties and now. The wind made a particular hollow sound through those twisted trees. I cannot describe it properly. It sounded like someone trying to remember something.

The best meal we had was not planned either. We were driving back from another failed attempt at reaching the lighthouse, took a random left at a junction that felt promising, and found a small smokehouse with a handwritten sign and a woman selling fish she had caught with her brother that morning. We ate rye bread with smoked mackerel on a plastic table outside, watching her repair nets, and it was absurdly good. The kind of good that makes you slightly angry at every overpriced restaurant meal you have ever had.

I kept meaning to see the actual sights. The bunker museums, the proper organised beaches, the things you are meant to do. But there was always another unmarked path, another unexpected view, another moment of realising we had no idea where we were and not particularly minding. On our last evening we got properly lost in the dunes, the light going that golden-grey colour it does before Danish summer nights finally admit it is bedtime, and we stumbled across a small lake we could not find on any map, perfectly still, with two herons standing in it like they were waiting for something we could not see.

I am back in Birmingham now. The sat nav works better here, or perhaps I just know where I am going less ambitiously. I still have the sea glass on my desk. Sometimes I pick it up and remember that feeling of deliberate accident, of choosing not to know what comes next. I think that might be the real souvenir. That and the knowledge that three Danish sheep now know exactly how lost one Englishman can get.