I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I missed the turning for Olpenitz twice. There I was, proudly navigating us through Schleswig-Holstein with all the confidence of someone who had briefly glanced at a map three hours earlier. The first time I sailed past the sign, I blamed the Sat Nav. The second time, I blamed my wife for distracting me with a packet of Haribo. By the third pass, I had run out of excuses and was quietly accepting my fate as the sort of person who gets lost in flat countryside with precisely one main road.

We finally crawled into Ostseeresort Olpenitz in the late afternoon, me wearing my best "I meant to do that" expression. The Blaue Lagune property sat there like a modern Scandinavian daydream, all clean lines and enormous windows, while I pulled up looking like I'd just completed a rally stage. My wife raised an eyebrow. I chose to focus on the water.

And what water it was. The place sits right on the Schlei inlet, that curious finger of brackish water that wiggles its way inland from the Baltic. I had expected postcard perfection. What I got was something far better: a working coastline with fishing boats, weather-beaten jetties, and that particular grey-green light you only find up here where Germany tapers towards Denmark. The sort of light that makes you feel you have discovered something, even though hundreds of people clearly got here before you.

The next morning, determined to redeem myself, I announced we would explore properly. No maps, no plans, just wandering. My wife, wisely, packed sandwiches. We set off along the coastal path with the sort of purposeful stride that quickly becomes a meander when you start noticing things. A heron standing in the reeds like a disappointed headmaster. The smell of smoked fish drifting from somewhere unseen. A small wooden bench facing the water, positioned with the precision of someone who had spent many evenings deciding exactly where the sunset looked best.

Then I got us properly lost. Not the missed-turning sort of lost, but the genuine article. The path petered out into marshy grass, the kind that looks solid until it isn't. We found ourselves in a tangle of low scrub and tidal channels, with the water on the wrong side according to my increasingly shaky sense of direction. My wife consulted her phone. I consulted my pride. Neither proved particularly useful.

But here's the thing about getting lost in Schleswig-Holstein: the landscape is too flat to stay lost for long, and too interesting to mind the detour. We stumbled across a tiny inlet where someone had moored a collection of wooden boats, their paint peeling in that deliberate Baltic fashion. No sign, no tourist information, just boats and silence and the occasional plop of a fish. We sat on a rotting plank and ate our sandwiches like we had discovered a secret.

Later, wandering back by what I loosely termed "instinct," we found a small stall selling fresh fish from a shed that appeared to be held together by optimism and creosote. The woman running it spoke rapid Plattdeutsch that I couldn't follow, but she smiled at my attempts and gave us extra smoked mackerel for effort. We ate it that evening on our terrace, watching the light fade over the Schlei, and I felt that particular satisfaction of accidental discovery.

The rest of the week continued in this fashion. A wrong turn on a borrowed bicycle led us to a hidden beach where locals gathered mussels at low tide. Following a path that seemed to lead nowhere delivered us to a viewpoint over the Kappeln bridge, that elegant old swing bridge that still opens for passing boats. Each time I thought I knew where we were going, the place gently corrected me.

By the end, I stopped pretending to navigate at all. We simply walked, cycled, occasionally circled back on ourselves, and found things. A bakery in a village I still cannot name, producing still-warm Franzbrotchen. A pier where an elderly man fed swans every morning at precisely eight. A stretch of reeds where the birdlife was so loud it felt rude to talk.

On our final evening, I admitted to my wife that my confident navigation had been largely performance. She laughed, unsurprised, and reminded me that I had also missed the airport turning on our honeymoon. We sat with glasses of wine, watching a heron work the shallows in exactly the spot where I had first seen one, and I realised that getting lost here had not been failure but method. The Blaue Lagune gave us comfort and that extraordinary view, but the surrounding country gave us its quiet, accidental gifts, one wrong turning at a time.

I still maintain the first missed exit was the Sat Nav's fault, though. Some things you do not surrender easily.