I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up driving down what I can only describe as a farm track somewhere near Gleima, convinced my sat nav had finally developed a grudge against me. The thing had been muttering about "turning around where possible" for a good ten minutes while I crawled past hedgerows that seemed to close in like curious spectators. My partner sat in the passenger seat, phone in hand, occasionally making small noises that were neither supportive nor entirely panicked. Then the track simply stopped at a gate with a cow on the other side, staring at me with the kind of judgement I usually reserve for people who put milk in first.

We had set off from the Midlands that morning, full of motorway optimism and service station sausage rolls, bound for a converted farmhouse in Thuringia. The plan was simple: drive to Gleima, find the holiday home, perhaps have a wander. Plans, I have learned, are merely suggestions that reality finds amusing.

Turning the car around involved a seventeen-point manoeuvre and what felt like a negotiated settlement with the cow. Half an hour later, we found ourselves on a proper road again, then somehow on a smaller road, then on something that might once have been a road before it decided to become a suggestion. This is how we discovered the first of our accidental treasures.

The path led past a small pond, barely marked on any map, where an elderly man sat fishing with the patience of someone who had nowhere else to be. He nodded at us without surprise, as if lost English people in hatchbacks were a regular feature of his Thursdays. We stopped, mostly because I needed to pretend this had been intentional, and got chatting in that broken way where everyone speaks slowly and gestures generously. He pointed us toward what he called "the old mill path," a walking route that had apparently been forgotten by everyone except locals and the occasional confused tourist.

We never did find the old mill. What we found instead was a clearing in the woods where someone, at some point, had built a rough wooden bench facing nothing in particular except trees and silence. We sat there for twenty minutes, sharing the emergency chocolate we keep in the glove compartment for precisely these moments of unplanned nothing. It was, in its accidental way, rather perfect.

By the time we actually reached the holiday home in Gleima, the afternoon had softened into evening and our official plans had dissolved completely. The property sat at the edge of the village, a solid Thuringian farmhouse with timber framing that looked like it had been there since before directions were invented. The owner, a practical woman named Frau Hoffman, handed over keys without ceremony and mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the forest behind the house had "paths, if you like that sort of thing."

We did like that sort of thing, as it turned out. The next morning, deliberately aimless, we walked from the back garden straight into woodland that felt immediately removed from anywhere mapped or marketed. Within ten minutes we were properly lost, which I consider the correct state for a holiday. The paths forked and reforked without signs, occasionally offering glimpses of clearings where mushrooms grew in patterns that looked almost deliberate, or sudden views down valleys toward villages we could not name.

At one point we stumbled upon a small concrete structure, half-swallowed by moss, which my partner decided was a Cold War relic and I decided was probably just a shed. We debated this for longer than the structure deserved, which is one of the pleasures of having no particular destination. The argument ended when we realised we had been walking in a rough circle and were now approaching the farmhouse from an entirely unexpected angle.

That evening, tired in the satisfying way that only comes from accidental miles, we sat in the garden with local beer and watched the light change over the Thuringian Forest. I thought about how much of my best travelling has come from being slightly incompetent, from wrong turns and misread maps and that particular optimism of thinking "this path probably goes somewhere."

It usually does, I have found. Just not somewhere you were expecting.