I have never been brilliant with directions, so when my partner suggested we drive to a holiday village in Schleswig-Holstein rather than fly somewhere sensible, I should have known the universe was lining up a joke at my expense. We were booked into Feriendorf Wardersee, one of those self-catering places with little wooden lodges clustered around a lake, and I had visions of a calm, restorative break. What I got was three hours of German countryside viewed through a windscreen while I stubbornly refused to admit we were lost.

The mishap came just outside Preetz. I had been navigating using my phone, which decided that moment to announce it was "rerouting" and then die completely. My partner, who had been saying "are you sure this is right?" in increasingly strained tones, went very quiet. I drove on with false confidence, turned down a farm track, and found myself face to face with a very large pig who looked as unimpressed as my partner. Reversing in a panic, I clipped a wooden fence post and knocked it clean over. The farmer who appeared was unexpectedly kind, spoke better English than my German, and pointed us back toward Wardersee with the air of someone who had done this many times before. I gave him twenty euros for the fence and my dignity.

We arrived at Feriendorf Wardersee in the fading light, me thoroughly deflated, my partner trying not to laugh. The reception was closed, but our key was in a little wooden box with a combination lock, and finding our lodge felt like a small victory. I stood on the tiny deck with a cup of tea made from the emergency stash in the car, looking at the dark shape of Wardersee itself, and something shifted. The quiet was extraordinary. No traffic, no planes, just the occasional splash of fish and the wind moving through the birch trees.

The next morning, still smarting from my navigational failure, I suggested we explore on foot without any map or phone. My partner raised an eyebrow but agreed. We walked along the lake path, which quickly became narrower and less maintained, and within twenty minutes I had led us somewhere unmarked. A small clearing opened onto a tiny beach of grey sand, completely empty, with a rotting wooden rowing boat pulled halfway up the shore. We sat on a fallen log and watched a heron stand motionless in the reeds. My partner said, "You found this by being terrible at directions," and I had to concede the point.

That became our method for the week. Deliberately getting slightly lost. We found a bakery in a village called Wahlstorf, not on any tourist route, where an elderly woman sold us still-warm poppy seed rolls and told us about the lake freezing solid enough to walk across in her childhood. We stumbled into a nature reserve we later learned was the Wardersee Moor, boardwalks sinking slightly underfoot, the smell of peat and bog myrtle, dragonflies hovering in clouds. One afternoon we took a wrong turning on hired bicycles and ended up at a farm selling fresh milk from a machine, filling our bottles in the sunshine while chickens pecked around our feet.

The hidden gem I remember most was not a place but a moment. We had got properly lost this time, cycling down lanes that grew progressively smaller, until we emerged at a tiny harbour on what I think was the Schwentine river. An old man was painting his boat. He nodded at us, said something in Plattdeutsch we could not understand, and gestured to a bench. We sat for an hour watching the water, not speaking, not needing to. I thought about how my need to control everything, to navigate properly, to arrive efficiently, had always stopped me noticing what was beside the road.

On our last evening we walked back to that first accidental beach. The rowing boat had not moved. The heron was gone but the reeds were full of small birds we could not name. I admitted to my partner that getting lost had been the best part, and they reminded me that I had not actually admitted being lost for the first two hours of the initial disaster. We laughed, and I made a resolution I have since broken many times: to get lost more often, on purpose, and see what turns up.

The fence post, incidentally, is probably still wonky. I hope the farmer spent the twenty euros on something more useful than my pride.