I have never been brilliant with sat navs, so it was hardly a surprise when mine decided that the quickest route to our holiday cottage in Rucphen involved three separate dirt tracks and what I can only describe as a very intimate relationship with a hedge. My partner sat in the passenger seat making that particular face, the one that says "I told you to update the maps" without actually uttering a word. By the time we rattled up to the proper driveway, I had already named the cottage "the unreachable lodge" in my head, which turned out to be spectacularly unfair because the moment we stepped out of the car, I forgot all about my navigational shame.

The first thing that struck me was the absolute silence. Not the uncomfortable, oppressive sort, but the kind that makes you realise how much noise you normally carry around in your own head. We stood there like a pair of lemons, just breathing it in, until a wood pigeon somewhere in the trees decided we had had enough peace and started its ridiculous cooing. My partner laughed, and I felt something unknot in my chest that I had not even known was tight.

We had arrived with no real plan beyond a vague notion of "seeing what happens," which is entirely unlike me. I am the person who colour-codes itineraries. Yet something about this corner of North Brabant had made me leave my laminated schedule at home, and within an hour of dumping our bags, that decision had already started paying dividends.

Wandering without purpose that first evening, we took a turning that looked promising purely because the light was hitting it nicely. The lane narrowed to little more than a path, overhung with oak branches that formed a proper green tunnel. I kept expecting it to dead-end into someone's garden, but instead it opened onto a small clearing where an elderly gentleman was tending what I can only describe as the most chaotic vegetable patch I have ever encountered. Pumpkins sprawled everywhere like they owned the place. He looked up, nodded as if strangers emerging from his hedge were perfectly routine, and offered us a handful of late raspberries from a canes patch that had clearly gone feral years ago. We ate them walking on, stained fingers and everything, and I cannot remember the last time fruit tasted that good.

The following morning we got properly lost. I mean the kind of lost where you genuinely have no idea which direction the cottage lies, where every lane looks identical and your phone has cheerfully announced it has no signal. We had set out for what the map suggested was a marked walking route, missed a turning somewhere, and ended up on a farm track between two fields of maize that stretched to the horizon like a rather monotonous ocean. My old self would have panicked. Instead, we kept walking, and the track delivered us to a tiny bridge over a drainage ditch that someone had clearly decided to decorate. There were painted stones arranged along the parapet, little scenes of local wildlife, flowers, even what looked like a portrait of a particularly grumpy heron. No plaque, no explanation, just someone quietly making something beautiful for the handful of people who might stumble across it.

We found our way back eventually, though I could not tell you how. The cottage itself turned out to be the sort of place that encourages aimlessness, big windows looking out over proper countryside, a garden that merged into meadow without any fussy boundary. I spent an embarrassing amount of time just watching a squirrel work out how to raid a bird feeder, marvelling at its persistence and its complete disregard for my presence.

By the third day, getting lost had become our strategy rather than our accident. We took the smallest lanes, the ones with grass growing down the middle, the ones that looked like they probably led nowhere. They always led somewhere, just never where we expected. A tiny chapel with a door that creaked like a horror film but contained the most peaceful interior I have sat in for years. A farm shop with no sign, just an honesty box and some excellent cheese. A pond where someone had left a bench facing the wrong direction, away from the water towards a field of sheep, which turned out to be infinitely more entertaining than any water view would have been.

I think what I am trying to say is that I came to Rucphen with my usual need to extract maximum value from every moment, and instead found myself valuing moments that had no value at all in any measurable sense. The getting lost, the accidental discoveries, the complete absence of anything that would make a proper tourist attraction, these became the whole point. I am not suddenly going to become one of those people who claims to have found themselves, whatever that means. But I might be slightly more willing to take the turning that looks like it goes nowhere, because sometimes, quite often actually, it goes somewhere better than you had planned.