I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a minor disaster, and my trip to Breukelen did not disappoint. The train from Amsterdam was straightforward enough until I realised, somewhere past Hilversum, that I had been confidently reading the wrong platform number for my connection at Utrecht Centraal. I found myself on a platform heading to Groningen, clutching a coffee I had just spilt down my only decent jumper, watching my actual train pull away from the opposite side of the station. By the time I arrived in Breukelen proper, I was two hours late, slightly sticky, and in no mood for further navigation.

The property itself, a compact wooden cabin tucked along a quiet waterway, was meant to be my base for exploring the wider Utrecht area. I had plans, you see. Proper plans. Maps marked with cafes and museums and that famous tower everyone photographs. But the next morning, still slightly rattled from my railway performance, I set off on what I intended to be a brief walk to clear my head and promptly got myself magnificently lost within twenty minutes.

Breukelen is not large. This should have been impossible. Yet somehow I took a turning that felt right, then another that felt righter still, and found myself on a narrow path between two fields with no idea where the main road had gone. My phone, in that smug way phones have, insisted I was standing in a small grey square surrounded by green nothing. I decided to keep walking rather than admit defeat.

That is how I discovered the boathouse. It sat at the edge of a canal I had not known existed, half-hidden by overhanging willows, with a small deck where an elderly man was painting what appeared to be the same boat he was sitting in. He nodded at me. I nodded back. We did not speak, but he gestured to a bench, and I sat there for perhaps half an hour watching dragonflies move across the water. I still do not know his name or exactly where that was. I have tried to find it since on my useless grey square map and failed completely.

From there I wandered further, abandoning any pretence of direction. I found a bakery in what I think was Kockengen, though my bearings were by then entirely fictional, where a woman sold me still-warm appelflappen and told me about a footpath along the river Vecht that tourists never use because it does not appear in guidebooks. She was correct. I saw no one for an hour except a heron that regarded me with the contempt herons reserve for the lost and underprepared.

The path brought me, eventually and unexpectedly, to a tiny marina where someone had converted an old houseboat into a floating bookshop. It was closed, but the owner appeared from somewhere, saw me peering through the window, and opened up anyway. We talked about Dickens, for reasons I no longer recall, and I left with a water-stained copy of Great Expectations that I am fairly certain had been rescued from actual water at some point.

By the time I stumbled back toward the cabin that evening, the sun was low and I had achieved nothing on my original list. The Dom Tower remained unclimbed. The famous canals of central Utrecht went unwalked. I had eaten no trendy brunch and visited no curated exhibition. Instead I was carrying a damp novel, crumbs of apple pastry in my pocket, and the certain knowledge that I could not retrace my steps to any of these places if my life depended on it.

I think that was the point I finally relaxed. There is something humbling about getting properly lost, something that strips away the performance of being a competent traveller. I had arrived planning to consume Utrecht efficiently, to tick and post and move on. Instead I had blundered into small, unrepeatable moments that belonged only to me because I had no idea where I was when they happened.

The rest of the week followed this pattern. I set out each morning with the deliberate intention of having no intention. I found a meadow where horses appeared from nowhere and followed me like a silent jury. I discovered a cafe in what must have been Maarssen that served bitterballen so good I ate eight and had to sit very still afterwards. I stumbled across a small museum of agricultural tools, unlocked and apparently unstaffed, where I wandered alone among rusting ploughs and tried to read Dutch information cards with the confidence of someone who absolutely does not read Dutch.

Each evening I returned to the cabin with muddy shoes and no photographs worth sharing. My partner, who had wisely stayed home, asked what I had done each day and I found myself saying "I am not entirely sure" with growing satisfaction. There is a particular joy in experiences that resist documentation, that exist only in your own unreliable memory and the mud on your boots.

On my final morning I tried once more to find the boathouse with the painting man. I failed, naturally. The path I took looked familiar until it did not, and I ended up somewhere else entirely, watching a family of coots navigate the reeds. I waved goodbye to no one in particular and caught my train home without incident, which felt almost disappointing.

I still have the Dickens. It smells faintly of canal water and sits on my shelf as the only physical evidence that any of this happened. Sometimes I open it and a pressed willow leaf falls out, or what I choose to believe is a pressed willow leaf, and I am back on that bench with no signal and no plan, finally exactly where I needed to be.