I have never been so relieved to see a cow in all my life. There we were, bumping down what I stubbornly insisted was a lane, my partner insisting with equal conviction that it was someone's drive, when a Friesian appeared over the hedge and settled the matter. We were definitely in the Dutch countryside, definitely lost, and definitely late for check-in at our Wagenborgen cottage.

The journey from Groningen city had started well enough. Lovely train ride, hire car sorted, me smugly navigating with a phone app that apparently considered "shortest route" and "actual roads" to be optional suggestions. Somewhere near Delfzijl the sat nav had a small breakdown of its own and decided we fancied a tour of agricultural access tracks. The cottage was meant to be fifteen minutes from the main road. Forty minutes later, we were on first-name terms with several sheep.

When we finally found the place, tucked between Wagenborgen village and the Ems estuary, I was too frazzled to appreciate much beyond the fact it had walls and a kettle. But the next morning, stepping out with a mug of coffee, the whole ridiculous journey suddenly made perfect sense. The Wagenborgen area sits in that satisfying middle ground where you're properly rural without being inconvenient, and our cottage had the sort of garden that melts into fields without making a fuss about boundaries.

We had planned, naturally. Lists were made. Museums in Groningen city, the Groninger Museum's flashy architecture, perhaps a canal boat if time permitted. Instead, on that first morning, we wandered down a footpath behind the cottage purely to stretch our legs and found ourselves in a landscape of grazing meadows and drainage ditches that looked essentially unchanged since someone painted it three hundred years ago. The path kept going. We kept following. An hour later we emerged in the village of Wagenborgen itself, which took all of four minutes to walk through, and discovered a bakery where an elderly woman sold us stroopwafels still warm from the iron, apparently baffled that anyone would need to ask if they were fresh.

That set the pattern. Each day we set out with vague intentions, got distracted by something unpromising, and ended up somewhere better. A wrong turning near the Dollard led us to a tiny harbour where a man was mending nets and cheerfully explained, in Dutch we barely followed, that his family had done so for generations. We nodded and smiled and understood perhaps every third word, but the important bit came through clearly: this was his grandfather's spot, and his grandfather's before that. He showed us where to stand to see seals on the mudflats at low tide. We returned the next morning and spent two hours watching them loaf about with the profound indifference to human observers that seals have perfected.

The Ems-Dollard estuary became our accidental playground. We found a bird hide by following a sign so weathered it was barely legible, then spent a happy afternoon with binoculars we hadn't thought to bring, squinting at what were probably important waders. Another time, attempting to reach Bellingwedde, we took a scenic route so scenic it added an hour, but delivered us to a farm shop selling cheese that made supermarket versions taste like candle wax.

By day four I had abandoned the lists entirely. My partner found this hilarious, given my usual need for structure, and I couldn't really argue. There's something humbling about realising your carefully planned holiday would have been half as good. The Wagenborgen cottage became our base for glorious uncertainty, each evening comparing notes on what we'd stumbled across. The village of Nieuweschans, nearly in Germany, discovered when a road closure forced us east. A tiny museum in a farmhouse, open only on Thursdays, which we encountered on a Thursday by sheer chance. A cafe in Delfzijl harbour where the owner insisted we try her mother's appeltaart recipe, and we were too polite to refuse second helpings.

What struck me most was how unbothered everyone seemed by our wandering. In Britain I suspect we'd have been firmly redirected, perhaps with a helpful map and a suggestion to stick to paths. Here, getting slightly lost appeared to be understood as a legitimate approach to the day. People pointed the way when asked, certainly, but without the slight anxiety that we ought to have known better.

On our final morning I walked the meadow path alone, deliberately taking a different fork just to see. It led to a small stand of trees I hadn't noticed before, and beyond them a view across the Dollard that stopped me mid-step. Flat water, distant Germany, the particular grey-green light of a northern morning. I stood there long enough to feel foolish, then longer still. No photograph would capture it, no description do it justice. I hadn't planned to find it, couldn't have if I'd tried.

We left the cottage reluctantly, the sat nav behaving itself on the return to Groningen city. I found myself almost disappointed by its efficiency. The train south felt like leaving something unfinished, which I suppose it was. But that's the nature of accidental discoveries, I think. You can't catalogue them, can't return to them with certainty. You simply have to trust that getting lost will keep being worth it.