I have never been someone who trusts a sat nav unconditionally, which is just as well because ours gave up somewhere between Oranienburg and nowhere, leaving me squinting at a road sign that appeared to point three directions at once. My partner, ever the optimist, suggested we simply follow our noses. This is how we found ourselves bumping down a gravel track flanked by pine trees, convinced we were either moments from our holiday let or about to disturb some very private Brandenburg farming business.

The track went on. And on. I began composing apologies in my head for whatever shed we were clearly about to reverse out of. Then the trees parted and there it was: a proper red-brick water mill sitting beside a still canal, with a small wooden bridge and a garden that looked almost aggressively well-tended. I had been expecting rustic. This was something closer to a postcard that had been waiting specifically for our arrival.

Our mishap, it turned out, had delivered us to the back of the property. The actual entrance was via a neat little lane in the village of Zerpenschleuse itself, which we discovered later when we went wandering. But that wrong turn became the making of our whole trip. There is something about arriving somewhere accidentally that strips away all expectation. We had no prepared reaction, no rehearsed delight. We simply stood there with our bags, slightly sweaty, grinning like people who had won something without entering.

The mill was divided into flats, ours being the one with windows facing the water. The owner, a woman called Renate who spoke excellent English with a Yorkshire twang she had apparently absorbed from a previous tenant, handed us keys and a map she had clearly photocopied too many times. "You will get lost," she said, not unhappily. "Everyone does. The paths here, they are not always where the map says."

She was not wrong. That first evening, determined to stretch our legs after the drive, we set out along the canal towpath intending a brief stroll. Within twenty minutes we had somehow crossed a bridge not marked on Renate's map and found ourselves in a birch wood where the light came through in stripes and the only sound was woodpeckers. We walked for perhaps an hour without seeing another person, passing a small lake we later learned was called Grosser Plessower See, though at the time it felt entirely ours. The discovery of it, unplanned and slightly anxious-making, gave it a quality no guidebook entry could replicate.

Getting properly lost became our daily ritual. We abandoned the car entirely after day two. The area around Zerpenschleuse is flat, networked with drainage ditches and old farm tracks, criss-crossed by cycling routes that appear and disappear without warning. One morning we followed what we thought was a proper path and ended up at a tiny railway halt where a diesel train to Berlin stopped twice daily. An elderly man was waiting with a folding bicycle. He nodded at us as if tourists emerging from the undergrowth were entirely routine, which perhaps they were.

The village itself rewarded accidental exploration. We found a bakery by following our noses literally, the smell of fresh bread leading us down a lane not mentioned in any information folder. The woman running it had been there thirty years and seemed faintly surprised we had managed to locate her without assistance. We bought pretzels still warm and ate them on a bench by the canal, watching a heron stand motionless in the reeds.

By the end of the week I had stopped checking my phone for maps entirely. There was a particular pleasure in not knowing precisely where we were, in trusting that the flat Brandenburg landscape would eventually deliver us back to something familiar. It always did, though sometimes by unexpected routes. We found a ruined manor house, its grounds overgrown with elderflower. We stumbled across a swimming spot where locals gathered, the water brown and surprisingly cold. Each discovery carried the slight thrill of trespass, even when it was entirely public.

On our final morning I got up early and walked out alone, deliberately taking a turning I had ignored all week. It led to a small cemetery beside a field of flowering rapeseed, the yellow almost violent against the grey stones. I stood there feeling the particular melancholy of holidays ending, but also something else: the quiet satisfaction of having let a place reveal itself rather than demanding it perform.

We left by the proper route, the sat nav now functioning again, the gravel track smooth beneath our wheels. I did not look back, which felt correct. Some arrivals are best left unimproved.