I have never been a natural navigator, which is why I found myself driving down what I can only describe as a very confident dirt track somewhere between Groningen city and Vlagtwedde, convinced that my phone had developed a sense of humour. The sat nav had cheerfully announced "turn left" at a point where left appeared to be someone's beetroot field. I turned anyway. The track became narrower. A horse looked at me with what I can only describe as professional disappointment. I reversed for two hundred metres of pure humiliation, returned to the proper road, and arrived at the holiday cottage forty minutes later with a story already in the bag.

The cottage itself sat at the edge of a village that felt like it had been arranged by a particularly tidy-minded giant. Everything in Vlagtwedde seemed to exist at a respectful distance from everything else. The house was one of those solid Dutch brick affairs with windows that actually open properly, unlike the theatrical gestures toward ventilation you get in British rentals. I dumped my bags, made a cup of tea that tasted faintly of the previous owner's coffee habits, and decided to explore before I lost the light.

This is where I should have brought a map. Instead I wandered out with the confidence of a man who had already been lost once that day and apparently enjoyed it. I turned down a lane simply because a cat walked that way and looked like it knew something. The lane became a path. The path became a track between two fields of something I initially thought was wheat but later learned was probably rye, after a farmer corrected me with the patient tone of someone who has met many ignorant Englishmen.

The track delivered me to a small wood I cannot name because no sign marked it and my phone had surrendered to the charms of rural signal coverage. Inside, someone had built a rough shelter from fallen branches, clearly used by local children or perhaps very committed dog walkers. I sat on a log and listened to nothing much happening very peacefully. A woodpecker performed somewhere to my left. I felt briefly like a character in a novel who has discovered something profound, then realised I needed to find my way back before dark and the feeling passed.

I did get lost again, properly this time. I emerged from the wood onto a road I did not recognise, followed it past a farm where geese staged an aggressive protest at my presence, and found myself in a hamlet called something like Sellingen or possibly something entirely different. A woman was closing up a tiny shop that sold, as far as I could tell, potatoes, bicycle parts, and an optimistic selection of greeting cards. She directed me back toward Vlagtwedde with hand gestures that suggested I had been remarkably close to the German border without realising.

The walk back took an hour. I passed a drainage ditch so perfectly straight it looked drawn with a ruler, a bench facing a field of cows that someone had clearly installed for the view, and a barn where a man was repairing something mechanical while singing along to Dutch radio. None of these things were in any guidebook I have since consulted. They were simply there, being ordinary and extraordinary in equal measure.

That evening I cooked a mediocre pasta and drank a decent beer on the cottage's small terrace, watching the sky do that particular Dutch thing where it stays light for improbably long. I thought about how I had planned to visit Groningen's museum, which I did later in the week and enjoyed well enough. But I kept returning in my mind to the wood with no name, the geese with strong opinions, the singing mechanic. These were the things I had not planned, could not have planned, found only because I was fundamentally bad at following directions and fundamentally good at following cats.

The next morning I set out deliberately to get lost again. I recommend it, though perhaps bring a compass. Or a cat.