I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like a farmer's front garden somewhere north of Drachten. There I was, convinced I was being terribly sophisticated by renting a proper waterside cottage in Lauwersoog, and instead I spent twenty minutes doing a three-point turn in a ditch while three very unimpressed Friesian cows looked on. My partner sat in the passenger seat with that particular expression of someone who has learned, over many years, not to say "I told you so" out loud.

We had set off from the ferry at IJmuiden with grand plans of a straightforward two-hour drive to Groningen's northern coast. The cottage was meant to be right on the Lauwersmeer, that great man-made lake where the sea once pushed inland until the Dutch, in their magnificent way, simply decided it would not. I had visions of stepping out onto a deck with a cup of tea, watching the boats bob about, feeling terribly at one with nature. Instead, I got intimately acquainted with rural road signage and the particular humiliation of being out-stared by livestock.

When we finally found the place, rattled and slightly hysterical with relief, I realised my first impression was going to be coloured entirely by the journey rather than the destination. The cottage sat in a little cluster of similar wooden houses, all perched at the edge of the water with small boats tied up alongside. The late afternoon sun caught the reeds and turned everything golden, and for a moment I just stood there with my ridiculous oversized suitcase, smelling the salt and the mud and something faintly fishy, and felt something unknot in my chest.

I had planned our first evening meticulously. We would unpack, stroll to a recommended restaurant, have a civilised meal. Instead, we wandered off in completely the wrong direction because I was too proud to admit I had already forgotten which turning the sat nav had eventually approved of. The path petered out into rough grass, then into something that was definitely a sheep track, then into nothing much at all. We were, by any reasonable measure, lost.

That is how we found the bench. It was nothing special, just weathered wood and a slightly wobbly leg, positioned where the land met the water at a particularly unremarkable spot. No view of anything in particular, no plaque, no reason for it to exist. We sat down because my partner's patience had reached its natural limit and I needed to pretend I had meant to bring us here all along. And then we simply stayed, watching the light change over the flat water, listening to birds I could not name making noises I had never heard before. A heron landed somewhere in the reeds with a sound like someone dropping a heavy coat. The whole world seemed to exhale.

I think that is the thing about places like Lauwersoog. They do not announce themselves. There are no dramatic cliffs, no picturesque fishing harbours with ice cream shops, none of the obvious charms that guidebooks can easily describe. It is all subtle, all suggestion, all the pleasure of noticing rather than being shown. We spent the rest of that week deliberately getting lost, finding little dead-end paths and unexpected clearings, a tiny beach where someone had arranged stones into a smiley face, a rotting wooden jetty that creaked alarmingly but offered the best view of a sunset I have seen in years.

On our final morning, I tried to find that first bench again and failed completely. It had vanished, or I had invented it, or the landscape had simply rearranged itself in that quietly stubborn way flat places do. I like to think it is still there, waiting for the next person stubborn enough to wander off the proper path.