I'd driven past the turn-off for Paasloo three times before I finally noticed the tiny wooden sign half-hidden behind a hedge. My sat-nav had given up somewhere near Steenwijk, and I'd been relying on instinct, which, as my wife politely reminded me, had never been my strong suit. We were already forty minutes late for check-in, I'd spilled coffee down my only decent jumper at a petrol station in Meppel, and now I was executing a clumsy three-point turn on a narrow lane while a man on a bicycle watched with the kind of patient amusement only the Dutch seem to manage.

The Paasloo itself appeared suddenly, tucked between birch trees and overlooking a stretch of water that I later learned was part of the Weerribben-Wieden National Park. It was smaller than I'd expected from the photos, which somehow made it more appealing, like finding a pub that's actually cosy rather than cramped. The owner, a woman called Marijke with practical shoes and a knowing smile, handed me the keys without mentioning our lateness, though her eyebrows did most of the talking.

I made the usual fool of myself with the door lock, turning the key the wrong way three times while Marijke waited with that particular Dutch tolerance for foreign incompetence. The interior smelled of pine and something else I couldn't identify, something old and clean. Beamed ceilings, a wood-burning stove stacked with ready-split logs, windows that actually opened properly without that juddering complaint British windows make. I wandered through to the back and found a small deck overlooking the water, two weathered chairs facing the reeds. A heron stood motionless on the far bank, apparently waiting for me to leave.

My wife discovered the bicycles in the shed while I was still unpacking with the chaotic energy of a man pretending he knows where things belong. They were ancient, slightly rusty, with saddles that adjusted via some mechanism I couldn't fathom. We set off without plan or purpose, which was the entire point, though I wouldn't admit that yet. The path along the water soon dissolved into something rougher, then became a track between fields where the evening light turned everything briefly golden.

I took a wrong turn somewhere near Kalenberg, not that I knew it at the time. The lane narrowed to a strip of compacted earth between ditches, then to a path, then to something that was definitely not intended for bicycles. We dismounted and pushed, mosquitoes discovering us with enthusiastic precision. I was preparing my defensive speech about masculine navigation instincts when the trees opened up and we found ourselves at a tiny harbour I'd never have located deliberately. Three boats, one man repairing nets, a shed selling smoked eel from a handwritten sign. We bought some from his wife, ate it standing on the wooden jetty with our fingers, and it was the best thing I'd tasted in months.

That became the pattern without our planning it. The morning I attempted a run and got comprehensively lost in the reed beds, emerging at a farm shop selling cheese so fresh it was still warm. The afternoon we followed a sign to something called a 'klompenmaker' and found an actual clog-maker, seventy years old, who let me try his lathe and produced something that resembled a clog only in the loosest sense. He kept it anyway, laughing, adding it to his wall of tourist failures.

I began to understand something I'd spent years resisting. My usual holidays involved lists, reservations, the anxious optimisation of limited time. Here, the best moments arrived precisely because I'd failed to plan them, because I'd turned left instead of right, because my phone had no signal and my confidence in my own direction had proved entirely misplaced. The Weerribben-Wieden is flat and watery and easy to get lost in, and that is entirely the point of it.

On our final evening, we cycled out with no destination and found a small beach where locals swam, invisible from any road, marked by nothing except a few bicycles in the grass. The water was brown and cold and full of vegetation that wrapped around my legs with alarming intimacy. I stood there like a fool, waist-deep, watching the sun disappear behind the reeds, and felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't known was tight.

We left the next morning with sand still in our shoes and eel grease probably still on my jumper. I never did learn to adjust those bicycle saddles properly. Marijke waved us off with the same knowing smile, and I understood now what she knew: that the place would remain with us not despite our getting lost, but because of it. I still can't read a map with any confidence, but I'm learning to trust the wrong turns.