I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I put the postcode into my sat nav and it directed me to a field of very unimpressed-looking Friesian cows. Three-point turn in front of an audience of bovine critics, phone signal flickering between one bar and none, me apologising out loud to nobody in particular. Classic start.

The actual route to Workum involved a narrow lane where I became intimately familiar with the etiquette of Dutch cyclists, specifically the sort who look at you as if you have personally insulted their entire family by existing in a vehicle. I waved cheerily. They did not wave back. By the time I spotted the traditional Frisian house with its stepped gable and that particular shade of green paint, my knuckles were the same colour as the canal water I'd been parallel-parking beside.

The key was in a lockbox with a code that, in my flustered state, I entered backwards twice. A woman watering her geraniums across the street watched this performance with the patient expression of someone who has seen many British tourists do exactly this. I gave her a thumbs up. She returned to her geraniums.

Then I stepped inside and the whole journey melted away. The place smelled of old wood and something faintly maritime, that particular scent of a house that has spent centuries near tidal water. Floorboards that had known generations of feet. A kitchen window framing a garden so green it almost hummed. I stood there with my ridiculous wheelie case and felt that lovely, embarrassing sensation of unexpected peace.

I had planned to unpack methodically, perhaps make a cup of tea in the proper manner. Instead I found myself wandering out the back door in my socks, following a path that seemed less designed than simply agreed upon by successive walkers. It led past a shed with a boat propped against it, paint peeling in that picturesque way that would cost thousands to replicate deliberately, and through a gate that squeaked with theatrical emphasis.

I had not intended to get lost within twenty minutes of arrival. Yet there I was, between two hedgerows that definitely had not featured in any of my brief research, with the sound of water somewhere to my left and sheep somewhere to my right. No phone signal, no map, no sensible shoes. The path narrowed to something a badger would consider spacious. I kept walking because turning around felt like admitting defeat to those cows by proxy.

The hedgerow opened without warning onto a small harbour I could not have found deliberately if I had tried. Three boats, none appearing to have moved recently. A bench with initials carved deep into weathered wood. Water the colour of strong tea in the afternoon light, and beyond it, reeds moving in patterns too complex to be merely wind. I sat on that bench for I do not know how long, watching a heron stand motionless in the shallows with the patience of something that has never once considered a sat nav.

That evening I walked back by a different accidental route, past a church with a leaning tower that no guidebook had warned me about, through a lane where someone had left a wheelbarrow full of tulip bulbs outside their gate with an honesty box and a note I could not read. I put coins in anyway, feeling like I was participating in a secret local economy.

The next morning I set out deliberately to get lost again. This is not something I would have admitted to myself previously, this active pursuit of disorientation. I had always been the person with backup plans and printed confirmations. Yet Workum and its surrounding lanes seemed to invite it, the way the land is so flat you can see weather approaching from impossible distances, the way paths simply appear between properties where elsewhere there would be fences and litigation.

I found a bakery by following my nose down an alley that narrowed until my shoulders nearly touched both walls. The woman inside spoke Dutch with the cheerful assumption that I would understand, and when I clearly did not, she simply spoke louder and slower, which somehow worked well enough. I left with something warm and almond-scented and a paper bag that left oil marks on my pocket for days afterwards, a small souvenir I kept finding unexpectedly.

The mishap with the sat nav became my origin story for that trip, the thing I told people later with practiced self-deprecation. But the truth is I am grateful to those cows and their judgmental faces. Without that wrong turn I would have arrived efficiently, unpacked methodically, consulted my list of recommended attractions within acceptable driving distance. I would have seen the things I was supposed to see and missed the harbour with the heron, the leaning church, the wheelbarrow of bulbs, the particular quality of light through reeds when you have no idea where you are and no urgent need to find out.

On my final morning I walked one last time without destination, found a small beach on the IJsselmeer shore where locals clearly came to escape the modest summer crowds, collected a stone that still sits on my windowsill. The sat nav found me eventually, as sat navs do, and guided me back through lanes I did not recognise in either direction. I waved at the cyclists this time without expecting response. One of them, perhaps the same one from my arrival, perhaps not, almost nodded. Progress.

I drove away slowly, watching Workum flatten into that extraordinary horizon, already forgetting the proper route, already unable to reconstruct exactly how I had found what I found. This seems appropriate. Some places should resist being fully mapped.