I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when my sat nav decided Harderwijk was actually a small village near Groningen, a full two hours north of where I actually needed to be. There I was, proudly pulling up to a petrol station in what I thought was my final destination, only to discover I was roughly 120 miles off course. The woman behind the counter looked at my booking confirmation with the kind of pity usually reserved for people who have just walked into a lamppost. I bought a stroopwafel out of sheer embarrassment and ate it in the car park while reconsidering my life choices.

By the time I finally rolled into the proper Harderwijk, somewhere in the heart of Gelderland, I was three hours late and had developed an irrational hatred of Dutch motorways. But then I saw the place, this compact little holiday home tucked along a quiet residential street, and something in my shoulders unclenched. The sat nav had nearly finished me off, but the house itself was a proper tonic. Small, neat, with that particular Dutch talent for making everything look effortlessly organised. I half expected to find my shoes already lined up by the door.

I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of a man who had been sitting in a Vauxhall Corsa since dawn and decided the only sensible thing was to walk until my legs remembered they could do something other than operate a clutch. This is where I should tell you I had a plan. I absolutely did not have a plan. I turned left out of the property for no reason other than the right turn looked too sunny and I am fundamentally a contrarian.

That left turn was possibly the best unplanned decision I have made since 2019. Within ten minutes I had wandered into a pocket of woodland I later learned was part of the larger Veluwe fringe, though at the time it felt like I had stumbled through a wardrobe. The path narrowed, the trees closed in, and suddenly I was alone with nothing but the sound of my own footsteps and what I choose to believe was a nightingale, though my bird identification skills are roughly on par with my navigation.

I walked for perhaps an hour with no sense of direction, which for me is genuinely liberating. Usually I am the sort of person who checks Google Maps before walking to the kitchen. Out here, with the afternoon light filtering through oak and birch, I found myself in a clearing where someone, at some point, had dragged a weathered wooden bench. No plaque, no viewpoint marker, no Instagram crowd. Just a bench, facing nothing more spectacular than a tangle of undergrowth and a particularly impressive anthill. I sat there for twenty minutes, feeling slightly foolish about my sat nav meltdown, slightly proud of my accidental discovery, and entirely content.

The getting lost continued, by design now rather than accident. The next morning I set out deliberately without my phone, which felt almost transgressive. I found a narrow cycle path that turned into a footpath that turned into what I can only describe as a generous gap between two hedges. This deposited me in a small field where a local man was flying a kite with the solemn concentration of a chess grandmaster. He nodded at me as if people emerging from hedges was entirely routine, and we stood there in companionable silence while his kite did lazy circles overhead. I never learned his name. I never asked. It was perfect.

Later that week I discovered a tiny harbour area, not the main marina with its proper boats and proper coffee shops, but a muddy little inlet where someone kept chickens in a converted shed and an old bicycle lay rusting in the reeds as if it had simply decided to give up on land-based transport. I went back twice, once with a sandwich, once with a beer from the local supermarket that I drank from a paper cup like a teenager. Both times I saw nobody. Both times I felt like I had found something I was not supposed to know about, which is of course the essential pleasure of getting properly lost.

There was a bakery too, found by following my nose down a street I had intended to walk straight past. No English menu, no attempt at tourist friendliness, just an elderly woman who pointed at things until I nodded, then wrapped them in paper with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this since before I was born. I ate whatever she gave me on a wall near a canal I could not name, watching a dog fall into the water and haul itself out with the philosophical resignation of a creature that had done this many times before.

By the end of the week I had stopped checking maps entirely. I found a route from the property to a small patch of heathland that I am almost certain did not exist on any official path network, though I may simply have missed the signs while admiring a particularly aggressive goose. I found a pond where dragonflies performed what looked like an elaborate military display. I found myself, on the final evening, sitting on that same wooden bench in the accidental woodland, wondering why I ever thought I needed to know exactly where I was going.

The sat nav, needless to say, has not been forgiven. But I have started turning left more often.