I had convinced myself that driving from the ferry at Rotterdam to Drenthe would be a doddle. Three hours, maybe four with a stop for stroopwafels. Seven hours later, I found myself in Exloo, standing in a supermarket car park, arguing with a sat nav that insisted I had arrived at my holiday cottage. I had not. I had arrived at the loading bay of an Albert Heijn, and a man with a pallet truck was looking at me with the weary patience of someone who had seen this exact scene play out many times before.

The actual cottage, when I finally found it tucked down a sandy lane fringed with birch trees, was one of those modern Dutch barn conversions that manages to look both rustic and faintly smug about its underfloor heating. I dumped my bags with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who had just completed an expedition rather than a straightforward drive, and decided the only sensible course of action was to walk until my blood pressure returned to normal levels.

This is where Drenthe gets you. The province is flat, which sounds dull until you realise that flatness gives you sightlines for miles, and those miles are stitched together with footpaths that seem to have been laid down by people who fundamentally trusted strangers not to wander into their back gardens. I took one such path, still muttering about the sat nav, and within ten minutes I was properly lost. Not dangerously lost, not call-the-emergency-services lost, just the pleasant disorientation of having no idea which copse of trees marked the turn back to civilisation.

I found a small pond, absolutely still, with a single wooden bench positioned as if someone had known exactly where a wandering Englishman would need to sit down and reconsider his life choices. A kingfisher flashed across the water, that impossible blue that always looks Photoshopped in real life, and I sat there for the better part of an hour, watching nothing much happen with complete contentment. The Albert Heijn felt like it belonged to another century.

The next morning, still refusing to use the sat nav on principle, I set out on a bicycle I found in the cottage shed. It had three gears and a basket that rattled ominously, and I loved it immediately. I intended to follow the signs to the Hunebed Centre, because prehistoric burial chambers felt like the sort of thing one ought to see. I missed the turning somewhere near a farm selling eggs on an honesty box, found myself on a compacted sand track between potato fields, and ended up at a tiny village called Odoorn that I cannot locate on any map I have since consulted.

Odoorn, or whatever it was called, had a church with a leaning tower, a cafe that served apple cake of almost criminal density, and a woman who explained to me in excellent English that I had cycled through a nature reserve without noticing and was lucky not to have been trampled by the Exmoor ponies they keep there for grazing. I had seen no ponies. I had seen a kestrel hovering, and a field of flax in flower that made the whole landscape look like it had been underwater, and a man in wooden clogs who waved at me with the unselfconscious friendliness that makes the Dutch slightly unnerving to reserved Britons.

By day three, I had abandoned any pretence of purposeful tourism. I would set out with a sandwich and a vague direction, get lost within half an hour, and find something I had not known to look for. A burial mound unmarked on any tourist leaflet, surrounded by sheep who watched me with the flat disdain of professional critics. A stream where I paddled and disturbed a heron into flight, its wings making that distinctive heavy sound like someone shaking out a damp tablecloth. A farm shop selling cheese from the cows I could see in the adjacent field, the owner chatting to me about moisture content with the passion other people reserve for football.

The thing about Drenthe, I came to understand, is that it does not announce itself. There are no dramatic peaks, no famous rivers, no cities that feature in weekend supplements. It is heathland and farmland and forest in proportions that shift subtly as you move through them, and the pleasure of it is in allowing yourself to be absorbed rather than entertained. I spent an entire afternoon in the village of Exloo itself, which consists of perhaps a dozen houses, a church, and a pub where I drank local beer and failed to finish a portion of bitterballen that would have fed a family of four.

On my final evening, I cycled out deliberately seeking nothing in particular, found another pond I had not seen before, and watched the sun set through birch trees that turned gold and then grey and then black against a sky the colour of old copper. The sat nav sat in my bag, unconsulted and unrepentant. I thought about all the places I had not found, all the wrong turns I had not yet taken, and felt something close to peace with my own capacity for getting things slightly wrong.

I drove back to Rotterdam the long way, naturally, and arrived with twenty minutes to spare before the ferry. The man at passport control looked at my dishevelment with mild concern. "Good holiday?" he asked. I told him I had spent most of it lost. He nodded, as if this were the correct answer, and waved me through.