I have never been particularly good with sat navs, which is how I ended up driving through what I am fairly certain was someone's front garden just outside Makkum. The lovely woman hanging out her washing gave me a cheerful wave, the kind of wave that said "tourist" without needing the actual word, and I wound down my window to apologise in my best phrasebook Dutch. She pointed me back toward the proper road with the patience of someone who had done this many times before. I found the holiday home twenty minutes later, slightly muddy, thoroughly embarrassed, and already rather fond of the place.

The property itself sat tucked along a quiet lane, the sort of location you would never stumble upon deliberately. That became the theme of my entire stay, really. Makkum is not the Friesland you see on postcards of Amsterdam canal houses or tulip fields. It is something quieter, more stubbornly itself. I dumped my bags and went wandering without much of a plan, which is when the proper discoveries began.

I took a path that looked like it led to the beach and somehow ended up in a small harbour where an elderly man was painting his boat an impossible shade of blue. We got chatting, mostly through gestures and my terrible Dutch, and he pointed me toward a bakery that does not appear on any map I have since consulted. The broodjes were still warm, and I ate two sitting on a bench watching the IJsselmeer do absolutely nothing in the most calming way possible. That bench, I should mention, I found by taking a wrong turn after the bakery. I was trying to head back toward the village centre and instead found myself in a tiny park with a single swing and a view of masts bobbing against grey water.

The next morning I hired a bicycle from a shop near the harbour, determined to see more of the coastline. Within half an hour I was thoroughly lost among the dykes, which all look charmingly identical when you are used to roads that actually bend occasionally. I stopped to check my phone and noticed a narrow track between two fields that seemed to lead nowhere useful. Naturally I took it. The track became a path, the path became grass, and then suddenly there was a small clearing with a bench and a hand-painted sign explaining, in Frisian and Dutch, that this spot had been used for ice skating races centuries ago. No visitor centre, no gift shop, just the wind and the odd cow staring at me with professional indifference.

I got lost again that afternoon, this time on foot, wandering through the village itself. Makkum is small enough that getting properly lost takes genuine commitment, but I managed it by following a cat down an alley that narrowed until I was practically turning sideways. The cat led me to a courtyard I would never have found otherwise, where a woman was selling second-hand books from her front room. I bought a battered copy of something in Dutch I still cannot read, mostly because she seemed so pleased to have a customer.

By the third day I stopped even pretending to have destinations. I would set out with a flask of coffee and see where the lanes took me. Once that meant a field full of sheep who followed me along a fence line like a very woolly, very slow parade. Another time it meant a sudden downpour and sheltering in a bus stop that, according to the timetable, saw service roughly twice a week. I shared it with a cyclist who told me, in excellent English, about a small museum in a nearby village that I never did manage to locate again. Perhaps it does not exist. Perhaps I imagined the whole conversation. Friesland does something odd to your sense of certainty.

The mishap on arrival never quite stopped being funny, at least to everyone except the woman whose garden I disturbed. I saw her again on my final morning, at the same bakery I had found by accident. She recognised me immediately, which I suppose says something about my driving or my face. We laughed about it, or at least she laughed and I made apologetic noises. I left Makkum with muddy shoes, a book I cannot read, and the strong suspicion that the best things I found were the ones I was not looking for at all.