I should have known the Sat Nav was plotting against me the moment it tried to send us through a field near Anklam. Three hours from Hamburg, two wrong turns, and one spectacular argument about whether I could read a map, we finally spotted the sign for Fischerdorf Zirchow. Victory, I thought. Premature, as it turned out.

The holiday park sits tucked between pine trees and the backroads of Usedom, the sort of place you find only when you have absolutely stopped trusting technology. Our little terraced house had a proper Baltic timber frame and a balcony that looked out towards nothing in particular except more trees and a faint promise of the sea somewhere beyond. I dumped the bags, grabbed the keys, and promptly walked straight into the sliding glass door. Not the frame, mind you. The actual glass. My partner laughed so hard she had to sit down. I stood there rubbing my nose, wondering if the neighbours had seen, fairly certain they had, and deciding that dignity was overrated anyway.

We had not planned to get lost that first evening. The plan was a quick walk to orient ourselves, perhaps find the nearest bakery for morning rolls. The plan lasted approximately seven minutes. A left turn that felt right, a path that narrowed, then another that widened into something resembling a proper track, and suddenly we were somewhere that definitely was not on the tourist map I had not bothered to bring. The pines grew thicker. The light turned that particular gold you get in Mecklenburg in late afternoon, when everything looks slightly magical and slightly like you might be eaten by a wild boar.

Then we heard water. Not the sea, something smaller. We pushed through some undergrowth and found ourselves on the edge of a tiny lake, barely a pond really, with a single wooden bench positioned as if someone had known we were coming. No signs, no path marked, just water and reeds and the kind of silence that makes you realise how loud your own thoughts have been. We sat there until the mosquitoes found us, which took longer than expected and ended the romance rather decisively.

The next morning, properly armed with coffee and actual directions from the woman in the park reception, we attempted to reach the nearest beach. Attempted being the operative word. A wrong turn at a junction near Zirchow village itself sent us down a farm track between two fields of rapeseed, blazing yellow and completely impassable by anything except tractors and stubborn pedestrians. We walked it anyway. At the end, round a bend we would have missed in a car, we found a small wooden pier jutting into the Peenestrom, the strait that separates Usedom from the mainland. An old man was fishing from it, smoking a pipe, watching a heron watch the water. He nodded. We nodded back. No words exchanged, none needed.

That became the pattern of the week. Deliberately wandering without purpose, finding places that felt discovered rather than visited. A clearing in the woods where someone had built a tiny shrine from driftwood and old fishing floats. A back lane between Zirchow and the coast where an abandoned railway line had become a cycle path, overgrown with wild roses that smelled like the sweets my grandmother used to keep in a tin. A village pub in nearby Korswandt where the landlord served beer he brewed himself and pretended not to understand my schoolboy German, forcing me to muddle through while he smiled behind his beard.

The holiday park itself became a sort of base camp rather than the main event. I grew fond of our little terrace in the evenings, cooking simple meals from the farmers market in Anklam, watching the same squirrels perform the same acrobatics on the same tree. The mishaps continued. I locked us out on day three. I set off the smoke alarm making toast on day five. I never did master that sliding door.

But the getting lost, that I mastered. Or rather, I stopped fighting it. There is something particular about this corner of Germany, this thin finger of land between the lagoon and the sea, where the tourist bustle of Ahlbeck and Heringsdorf feels a million miles away even when it is not. The landscape does not announce itself. It waits for you to slow down, to take the path that looks less promising, to trust that a wrong turn might be a right one in disguise.

On our last evening, we found ourselves lost again, inevitably, on a track near the coast. The sun was dropping towards the water, turning the sky that Baltic pink that seems to belong to this place alone. We could hear the sea now, proper waves, though we never did find the beach access. Instead we found a bench, another one, positioned with the same mysterious intention as the first. We sat. We watched the light change. We did not speak much. There seemed nothing that needed saying.

I thought about the sliding door, the Sat Nav, the various small humiliations of the week. They felt like part of it now, the necessary price of admission. You do not find the hidden places by knowing where you are going. You find them by being willing to not know, to walk into the occasional glass door, to trust that somewhere in the not-knowing, something worth sitting still for is waiting.

The mosquitoes found us eventually, as they always do. We walked back by instinct, somehow, reaching the park as darkness fell. The old man was not on the pier. The heron probably was, somewhere, watching something, being perfectly still. I have no photographs of any of it, which feels right. Some things you only get to keep by not trying to hold onto them.

We left the next morning, early, the Sat Nav behaving itself for once, the roads clear and straight and boring. I did not walk into any doors. I almost missed it.