I should have known the Harz would have the last laugh when I confidently told my partner I had "mastered" the sat nav. Three hours from Hamburg, cruising through Lower Saxony, I was feeling rather pleased with myself. Then the roads narrowed. Then they turned to gravel. Then, according to my phone, we were apparently driving through someone's beetroot field. The sat nav had quietly switched to "shortest route" rather than "sensible route," and there we were, bumping along between rows of vegetables, me doing that tight-lipped smile you do when you know you've made a colossal error but haven't admitted it yet.

We found our way eventually, of course. A local chap walking his dog pointed us back toward Thale with the amused expression of someone who'd seen this exact scene a hundred times before. "The sat nav does this," he said, in that helpful German way. "Always the beetroot field."

The Thale/Harz cottage sat tucked into woodland just outside the town, and arriving flustered and slightly muddy somehow made it feel more like discovery than check-in. The key was in the lockbox, the instructions mercifully clear, and stepping inside felt like exhaling after holding your breath for hours. Wooden beams, a proper stove, windows that framed nothing but trees. My partner gave me that look - the one that said "you're forgiven, but only just."

We'd planned to unpack properly, make a cuppa, perhaps study a map like sensible people. Instead, we wandered. That's the thing about the Harz - it doesn't let you plan too carefully. The woodland paths behind the cottage looked inviting, so we followed them without much thought, still in our travelling clothes, me still slightly defensive about the beetroot incident.

Within ten minutes we were properly lost. Not dangerously lost, just gloriously, happily lost. The path forked, then forked again, and we chose based on which direction looked more interesting, which is of course no system at all. We stumbled upon a clearing where someone had arranged stones into a rough circle, clearly years ago, moss growing between them. No sign, no explanation, just this quiet mystery in the middle of nowhere. We sat on the stones like we belonged there, listening to nothing much, and I found myself thinking about how rarely I let myself get lost on purpose. Always optimised, always efficient, always the fastest route. The beetroot field suddenly seemed less like failure and more like the holiday actually beginning.

Pressing on, we found a stream we'd never have encountered on any marked trail, shallow enough to wade across, cold enough to make you gasp. On the other side, an old boundary marker from who knows when, the paint faded to suggestion, the inscription barely legible. We photographed it like archaeologists, though we couldn't read a word.

By the time we circled back to something recognisable, dusk was settling and our cottage lights glowed welcoming through the trees. We'd been gone three hours, had no proper supplies for dinner, and hadn't seen another soul. It was absolutely perfect.

That evening, we cooked pasta with whatever we'd grabbed at a petrol station, drank wine from mugs because we couldn't find the glasses, and pored over an actual paper map trying to trace where we'd been. We couldn't manage it exactly. The paths we'd taken didn't seem to exist, or perhaps we'd simply not noticed when they became something else.

I kept thinking about that stone circle, and the boundary marker, and how we'd never have found them with proper planning. The sat nav had tried to ruin my day with its beetroot obsession, but the Harz had other ideas. Sometimes you need to be led astray to find what wasn't meant to be found.

The next morning, we set out again with no particular destination, and I left my phone deliberately behind.