I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I missed the turning for Priwall not once, but three times. There I was, crawling along the B76 with a boot full of groceries and a sat nav that had apparently taken a personal dislike to me, doing laps of Travemuende like a confused seagull. The third time I passed the same fish and chip stand, the chap running it actually waved. I waved back, obviously. British to the core, even when mortified.

When I finally found the right spit of land and pulled up at the little wooden house, I stood there for a good minute just blinking. The place was tucked among pine trees with the sort of quiet that makes you realise how loud your normal life is. Through the branches, I could just catch glimpses of the Trave estuary glittering away, and somewhere in the distance a ferry horn sounded, low and mournful. I had arrived, technically, though I felt less like a conqueror and more like someone who had accidentally stumbled into a secret.

The mishap with the directions turned out to be rather fitting, because Priwall itself feels like somewhere you discover by mistake. It sits on this odd little peninsula, separated from the bustle of Travemuende proper by the river mouth, and the whole place has the atmosphere of a well-kept secret. I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of the truly lost-now-found and went wandering almost immediately, still in my driving shoes, which was a decision I would regret when the sandy paths gave way to damp forest floor.

I had not planned to get properly lost. I had planned, if we are being generous with the word, to find the beach and perhaps walk along it in a sensible manner. Instead I took a wrong turning within five minutes, following what I thought was a proper path but which quickly narrowed into something a deer might hesitate over. The pines closed in, the light went strange and green, and I found myself in a clearing I could not have found again if you had paid me. There was an old wooden bench there, weathered to the colour of driftwood, facing nothing in particular except more trees and a glimpse of water. I sat down, partly because my driving shoes were already ruined and partly because there did not seem to be anything else to do.

That bench became my spot for the week. I never managed to find it by trying. Every time I set out purposefully, I ended up somewhere else entirely - a sudden view of the Priwall harbour where small boats bobbed like toys, or a stretch of dunes where the grass grew in tufts tough enough to withstand the Baltic winds, or once, memorably, a clearing where someone had built an elaborate den out of fallen branches, clearly the work of dedicated children or perhaps a very committed adult. I never saw who built it.

The getting lost became the whole point. I stopped bringing my phone, which was useless for signal anyway, and learned to recognise landmarks the old way. That particularly twisted pine. The spot where the path forked around a boulder covered in lichen. A sudden smell of salt that meant the estuary was near. I found a tiny beach, barely twenty metres of sand, where the water lapped in that particular Baltic way, flat and cold-looking even on sunny days. I never saw another person there. I collected smooth stones that I later realised I had no practical use for, arranged them on the windowsill of the wooden house, and felt unreasonably pleased with myself.

On my last evening, I finally found the proper beach by accident, having given up looking for it. The sunset turned the estuary pink and gold, and the ferries going in and out of Travemuende cut through the light like slow-moving shadows. I stood there with sandy feet and the same driving shoes, now thoroughly destroyed, and thought about how much of my normal life is spent going efficiently from A to B. The week of wrong turnings had shown me things no guidebook could have, though I could not tell you precisely how to find any of them again.

I drove home the long way round, just to see.