I should have known the Harz would have the last laugh when I confidently told my partner I'd "sorted the navigation." Three hours out of Hanover, our sat nav decided that a farm track near Thale looked suspiciously like a shortcut. It was not a shortcut. It was a mud bath with delusions of grandeur, and by the time we reversed back to tarmac, I'd aged approximately twelve years and earned a look that said "we'll discuss this later."

But here's the thing about getting properly lost in the Harz: it hands you things you didn't book.

We finally rolled up to our place in Thale rattled, muddy, and ready for nothing more strenuous than a cuppa. The cottage sat tucked beneath the Bodetal cliffs, which I'd seen in photos but somehow expected to be less... immediate. They loom. Properly loom. My partner unpacked while I stood in the garden with my tea going cold, just staring up at rock faces that looked like they'd been dropped there by a giant having a clear-out.

The next morning, still smarting from my navigational triumph, I suggested we "just wander" rather than follow any plan. Thale itself is compact enough that this feels manageable, which is dangerous. We set off toward the Rosstrappe, that famous crag where legend says a princess leapt her horse across a chasm to escape a giant. The marked path was straightforward. We ignored it.

A narrow track veered left where the main route went right, and something about it looked invitingly unofficial. Ten minutes later we were in woodland so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat. The path narrowed, then forked, then forked again. I maintained an air of confidence I absolutely did not feel.

We emerged, somehow, at a tiny clearing with a wooden bench facing a view no brochure mentions. The Bode valley stretched below, not from the dramatic angle of the Rosstrappe but from this modest perch where someone had clearly spent time with a saw and some dedication. A laminated note was cable-tied to the bench: "Fur Gabi, 2007." That's all. We sat there for an hour. No other walkers passed.

The getting-lost theme continued. That afternoon, trying to find our way back down, we took another wrong turn and found ourselves at a small hydroelectric building from the 1920s, still operational, with a handwritten sign offering tours "by arrangement." No one was about, but the door stood open, and inside was a workshop preserved like someone had stepped out in 1953 for a smoke and never returned. Calipers, hand tools, a kettle on a gas ring. We didn't touch anything. Just looked, and left, feeling like we'd burgled someone's afternoon without meaning to.

By day three, we'd abandoned maps entirely. We found a swimming spot in the Bode where locals clearly came, marked only by a flattened patch of grass and a rope swing that looked both thrilling and potentially litigious. We found a bakery in Thale's back streets where the woman spoke no English and we spoke patchy German, but somehow emerged with still-warm Streuseltaler and a recommendation for a viewpoint that "the tourists don't know."

She wasn't wrong. The viewpoint required a scramble up an unmarked slope behind the chairlift station. At the top, the Harz spread out in proper Brothers Grimm fashion: dark forests, sudden meadows, the glint of the reservoir at Wendefurth. We could see the proper tourist path below us, people filing along in orderly fashion. We felt unreasonably smug.

The cottage itself became part of this accidental rhythm. Each evening we'd return with some new discovery: a flier for a folk music evening we'd never have planned, picked up from a pub we only entered because it started raining. A recommendation for smoked trout from a man selling honey at an unmarked stall. The hot tub on the terrace, which we'd assumed was a bit naff, became essential after each day's unplanned exertions.

I started the week thinking I'd organise things properly. I ended it realising that my spectacular failure with the sat nav had set the tone perfectly. The Harz doesn't reward efficiency. It rewards the willingness to look wrong, to follow the smaller path, to accept that you might end up somewhere with no name and no facilities and find that's exactly where you wanted to be.

On our final morning, I tried to find that bench for Gabi again. Couldn't manage it. The paths had shifted in my memory, or perhaps they were never quite where I thought. We left with the map still folded in the glove compartment, unused, and with my partner finally admitting that getting lost had been, against all probability, the right way to arrive.