I have never been so relieved to see a sheep as I was when I finally rolled up to our holiday cottage in Kropswolde. The journey from Groningen city centre had started well enough, a straightforward twenty-minute drive through pancake-flat Dutch countryside, but my overconfidence in Google Maps and a spectacularly misjudged roundabout exit had deposited me somewhere near what I can only describe as Very Lost Indeed. There were no signs, no other cars, just me, a hire bike strapped to the roof, and a growing suspicion I had accidentally cycled into a watercolour painting.

The mishap that defined the whole trip came within five minutes of setting off. Convinced I was being clever, I had ignored the main road and taken what looked like a shortcut past Hoogezand. It was not a shortcut. It was a farm track. A very long farm track. A very long farm track that ended in a locked gate, a furious goose, and the realisation that I would need to reverse my Renault Clio for nearly half a mile while Dutch cyclists passed me with the kind of sympathetic looks usually reserved for small children learning to ride without stabilisers. By the time I found actual tarmac again, I had discovered something wonderful: the complete absence of any clue where I was.

This is how I found the hidden gem that made the entire holiday.

Rather than panic, I did what any sensible person would do. I parked illegally on a grass verge, ate an emergency stroopwafel, and set off on foot down the nearest path that looked unofficial. Within ten minutes I had stumbled onto a narrow waterway I later learned was called the Kropswolde-Hoogezand canal, though at the time it felt like my own private discovery. An elderly man in a tiny boat waved. A kingfisher darted past. I stood there with crumbs down my front feeling genuinely, unexpectedly happy.

The cottage itself, when I finally located it, turned out to be a converted farmhouse with beams low enough to remind me I am not, in fact, built for seventeenth-century doorways. I cracked my head twice before dinner. But the real magic happened when I stopped trying to plan anything and simply wandered.

Getting lost became the entire point. Each morning I would cycle in a deliberately wrong direction, following my nose down unmarked paths between fields of potatoes and sugar beet. I found a tiny bakery in Sappemeer that only opened on Thursdays, where an ancient woman sold me appelflappen still warm from the fryer and refused to let me pay full price because, as she put it, I looked confused. I discovered a swimming lake near Foxhol that had no signage whatsoever, just local teenagers and a rope swing that I absolutely should not have used at my age and absolutely did.

The best find came on my third day. Taking a wrong turn meant for the village of Waterhuizen, I ended up on a dead-end path along the Winschoterdiep canal. At the very end sat a ramshackle cafe in what appeared to be someone's shed, serving coffee so strong it could have stripped paint and homemade rookworst sandwiches that I still think about in quiet moments. The owner spoke no English. I speak approximately twelve words of Dutch, nine of which are food-related. We communicated through gestures, pointing, and mutual goodwill. It was perfect.

By the end of the week I had stopped using maps entirely. The flat landscape that initially seemed featureless had revealed itself as subtly varied, full of unexpected rises and hidden waterways, each wrong turn a potential adventure. I found myself genuinely disappointed when I accidentally arrived somewhere I had intended to go.

On my final evening I cycled out with no destination at all, got comprehensively lost one last time, and watched the sun set over fields from a dyke I could never find again if you paid me. The goose that had started it all was nowhere to be seen. I like to think we had both moved on.