I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I trusted my sat nav over a local farmer. There I was, winding through the Thuringian Forest in my slightly-too-wide hatchback, convinced I knew a shortcut to our cottage in Steinheid. The farmer, leaning on his gate with the patience of a man who has watched many tourists make this exact mistake, simply shook his head as I bounced past him down what was clearly a logging track. Twenty minutes of increasingly nervous driving later, I found myself at a dead end staring at a very unimpressed-looking goat. I reversed the entire way back. The farmer was still there. He waved. I waved back. We did not make eye contact.

The actual approach to the cottage was far more civilised, though no less dramatic. Steinheid sits in that folded green landscape where Thuringia seems to gather its breath before the hills get serious. The village itself is small enough that you might miss it if you blinked at the wrong moment, which is precisely its charm. Our holiday home turned out to be a solid, unpretentious place with a balcony that looked out over nothing but trees and the occasional hawk circling on thermals. I stood there with a cup of tea that first evening, still slightly shaken from my agricultural detour, and felt the particular satisfaction of being properly lost in a way that GPS cannot quite replicate.

The next morning, determined to redeem my navigational reputation, I set out with a map I had found in a kitchen drawer. It was hand-drawn, slightly coffee-stained, and clearly intended for walkers with more experience and better knees than I possess. I ignored the sensible marked routes within minutes. A path that looked promising led me down through a stand of beech trees to a stream I could not name, where I disturbed a heron that rose with an indignant squawk. I followed the water because it seemed easier than climbing back up, and that is how I found the old mill.

It was not on any map I later consulted. A stone building half-swallowed by moss and elder, with a water wheel that still turned sluggishly in the current. No signs, no information board, no gift shop. Just the sound of water and the faint smell of something herbal growing wild in the damp corners. I sat on a fallen log and ate the sandwich I had wisely packed, feeling like I had stumbled into a secret that the forest was keeping mostly to itself.

Getting properly lost became the pattern of those days. A wrong turn on what I thought was the route to Neuhaus am Rennweg led me instead to a clearing where someone had arranged stones into a rough circle, for reasons I could not guess and did not need to know. Another afternoon, following what I believed was a path to a viewpoint, I ended up at a smallholding where an elderly woman sold me honey from her own hives and told me about the wild boar that came down from the ridges in autumn. She spoke Thuringian dialect so thick I caught perhaps one word in three, but we understood each other perfectly well through gestures and the universal language of appreciating good honey.

The village of Steinheid itself rewarded wandering without purpose. I found a bakery by following my nose one morning, the sort of place where the woman behind the counter assumed I wanted the local specialities without my needing to ask. Thuringian bratwurst from a butcher who smoked his own, eaten on a bench near the village pond while ducks judged my life choices. A small chapel, unlocked, with candles still burning from someone's private devotion and light coming through windows that needed cleaning in the most beautiful way.

On my final evening, I tried to find that nameless stream and the old mill again. I failed completely, which felt exactly right. Some places, I have decided, only reveal themselves by accident, to travellers who have first earned their attention by getting something else entirely wrong.