I should have trusted my gut when the sat-nav started pronouncing Danish place names like a confused robot. "Smidstrup Strand," it announced, turning three syllables into something resembling a sneeze. My partner gave me that look, the one that says "you insisted on driving," and I gripped the steering wheel a bit tighter.

We'd flown into Copenhagen and picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of fish and air freshener, a combination I now associate with the beginning of proper adventures. The motorway north was straightforward enough, but somewhere past Helsingor I got cocky. Decided to take a "scenic route" along the coast. This is where the mishap occurred, and I blame the light. That soft, golden Scandinavian evening light that makes every field and farmhouse look like it belongs on a biscuit tin. I was distracted by a particularly handsome red barn when I missed the turning, then missed the next one, and before I knew it we were bumping down a gravel track between potato fields with the sat-nav making increasingly distressed noises.

The track ended at a locked gate. I performed a seventeen-point turn while my partner helpfully reminded me that we'd passed a sign for something beginning with "G" perhaps ten minutes back. We found ourselves in a village that doesn't appear to exist on any map I've since consulted. A woman was hanging washing in her garden, and I attempted to ask directions in my best attempt at Danish, which sounds like speaking English with a potato in your mouth while gargling. She smiled patiently and pointed us toward what she called "the old fishing path," a narrow lane between two hedgerows that looked like it hadn't seen a car since the 1970s.

This is how we discovered the first of our accidental treasures. The lane emerged suddenly onto a tiny cove, barely twenty metres of shingle beach, where an elderly man sat mending nets outside a shed that couldn't legally be described as a building. He nodded at us as if strangers emerging from the undergrowth were perfectly routine, and we stood there watching the Oresund glitter while he worked in complete silence. We never learned his name or even where exactly we were. My partner took a photograph that I still can't quite believe isn't a painting.

Properly lost now, we abandoned the sat-nav entirely and simply followed the coastline, taking whatever lane looked most unpromising. This strategy led us to a churchyard where someone had planted an orchard among the graves, apples already swelling on branches that shaded centuries-old headstones. It led us to a farm shop, unmarked, where we bought the first new potatoes of the season and ate them cold in the car, still dusty from the track, tasting of butter and earth and something I can only describe as Danish summer.

By the time we found Smidstrup Strand, proper darkness had fallen and we were laughing too hard to be frustrated. The holiday house sat among pines, modest and welcoming, and we carried our bags in with the particular satisfaction of people who have already had an adventure before their holiday has technically begun.

I keep thinking about that unnamed cove, that orchard churchyard. The deliberate traveller would never find them, and I suspect that's rather the point.