I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's front garden. There I was, crawling along a narrow lane somewhere north of Meppel, convinced I was being directed to a dairy farm rather than a holiday cottage. The voice kept insisting I turn left in three hundred yards, but all I could see was a very determined-looking goose blocking a farm gate. I named him Gerald. We had a staredown. Gerald won.

By the time I actually found Wezuperbrug, I'd been properly lost for the better part of an hour. The thing about Drenthe, I've since learned, is that getting lost isn't really a bug in the system - it's the entire point. I'd pulled over for what I thought was a tactical three-point turn in a patch of woodland, and instead stumbled upon a tiny hunebed I never knew existed. These ancient megalithic tombs are scattered all over the province like forgotten furniture, and this one was just sitting there in the trees, completely unmarked, moss growing over stones that farmers have been farming around for five thousand years. I stood there with my car door still open, feeling like I'd discovered something properly secret.

The cottage itself, when I finally arrived, was one of those satisfyingly solid Dutch farmhouses with beams that have seen things and a kitchen that smelled faintly of coffee and previous occupants' good intentions. I dumped my bags with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who'd survived mild adversity and immediately set out again on foot, still chasing that accidental-discovery feeling.

I found it down what started as a proper path and gradually became something more theoretical. The Drents-Friese Wold national park presses right up against this corner of the province, and its edges bleed into farmland in the most casual way imaginable. One minute you're on a gravel track between fields, the next you're in proper heathland with the light doing that flat, silvery thing it does across Dutch skies. I took a wrong turn at a junction of two equally unmarked paths and ended up at a tiny lake, really more of a generous pond, where someone had left a wooden bench facing the water with no plaque, no explanation, just the assumption that whoever needed it would find it.

That evening I cycled into what I thought was the village of Wezuperbrug proper and missed it entirely, ending up instead at a farm shop selling eggs and honey from a honesty box. I left with both, plus directions to a cafe that turned out to be someone's conservatory with excellent apple cake. The owner, a woman called Marieke who spoke English with the precision of someone who'd learned it from BBC radio, told me about a swimming spot locals use where the stream widens. "You won't find it online," she said, with the quiet pride of someone sharing actual treasure.

She was right. I didn't find it the next day either, not exactly. I found somewhere else instead, a stretch of boggy meadow where the ground squelched satisfyingly and the reeds made that particular rustling sound that suggests water nearby. I sat on a fallen tree and ate my stolen-apple-cake lunch and watched a heron do absolutely nothing for twenty minutes. It was perfect.

The thing about planning to get lost, of course, is that you can't. The magic only happens when you're genuinely trying to be somewhere else. By my third day I'd stopped bothering with the map entirely, just set out in mornings with water and vague ambition. I found burial mounds I couldn't name, paths that ended in sudden clearings, a tiny church with its door unlocked and its guestbook full of strangers' handwriting. Each wrong turn felt less like failure and more like the whole point of being there.

On my last morning I tried to find that first hunebed again, the one in the woods, and couldn't. Gerald the goose had moved on, or I'd invented him, or the lanes had shifted slightly in the night. It didn't matter. I'd stopped needing to find anything specific. The getting lost had become the finding, which sounds like something I'd cross-stitch on a cushion but genuinely felt true as I packed the car and programmed the sat nav with the wary suspicion it deserved.

I took the long way home, naturally. Got lost twice more before I even reached the motorway. Would recommend.