I have never been very good with sat navs, which is how I ended up driving down a canal-side path barely wider than my hire car, convinced I was moments from our holiday cottage in Noordwijkerhout. The polite Dutch cyclist who had to flatten himself against a hedge to let me pass did not look surprised. I suspect he has seen many British drivers following their phones into places they definitely should not be.

The proper road, when I finally found it, felt almost embarrassingly obvious. There was the sign, there was the neat gravel drive, and there was our little bungalow tucked between tall pines with a garden that smelled of warm pine needles and something faintly salty from the sea not far off. I stepped out of the car feeling rather foolish but also rather pleased with myself. There is something about a wrong turn that makes the right one feel like an achievement.

We had arrived in the late afternoon, that golden hour when the light slants through the trees in the way that makes everything look slightly magical. The bungalow was simple and spotless, with a kitchen that opened onto a small terrace. I made tea immediately, because I am British and this is how I process all emotions, including the emotion of having accidentally terrorised a cyclist. My partner unpacked while I stood on the terrace with my mug, watching a magpie argue with something in the undergrowth.

That evening we walked without any particular plan, which is not like us. Usually I am the sort of person who researches walking routes and downloads maps. But something about the bungalow's location, surrounded by woods and dunes and the general sense of being slightly lost already, made me want to keep going. We took a path that looked like it might lead somewhere and found ourselves in a clearing where someone had built a tiny wooden shelter, barely big enough for two people, with a bench inside and a view across a field of tall grass that moved like water in the breeze. There was no sign explaining it, no information board, nothing to suggest it was meant for tourists. It felt like finding someone else's secret.

The next morning we got properly lost. I mean this literally. We set off on bicycles that the cottage had available, heading vaguely toward what I thought was the coast, and within twenty minutes I had no idea where we were. The paths through the dunes all looked the same. The signs were in Dutch and my phone had decided this was an excellent time to run out of battery. My partner, who trusts my sense of direction more than he should, kept pedalling gamely behind me.

We found a small lake, perfectly round, with reeds and a single heron standing in the shallows. We found a bench with a plaque commemorating someone called Willem, who apparently loved this spot. We found a narrow lane between two fields where an elderly man was walking a dog that looked older than he was. He nodded at us as if cyclists appearing from nowhere were entirely normal, which perhaps they are in this part of the world.

By the time we stumbled back toward familiar territory, hungry and slightly sunburned, I had stopped worrying about being lost. There is a particular joy in not knowing where you are, in a small and safe way, in a landscape that keeps offering up these accidental discoveries. The Netherlands, I was learning, is not all flat fields and busy cycle paths. This corner of Southern Holland, between the bulb fields and the coast, has pockets of quiet that feel almost hidden on purpose.

We passed our final evening back at that first clearing, the one with the little wooden shelter. Someone had left a candle in a jar on the bench, and we lit it as the light faded. I thought about Willem's bench, and the heron, and the cyclist who had flattened himself against the hedge. I thought about how much I would have missed if the sat nav had worked properly. Sometimes the wrong path is the one worth taking.