I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I packed my partner's walking boots instead of my own. There we were, three hours into the drive from Oslo, me squelching around a petrol station forecourt in boots two sizes too small while a very patient Norwegian man pretended not to notice my grimace. The things we do for a week in the mountains.

The journey to Golsfjellet had already delivered the goods before we even arrived. Winding up through Buskerud, the landscape slowly shedding its civilised layers like someone getting comfortable after a long day, until suddenly there were no more villages, just forest and the occasional flash of a lake through the trees. We missed the turning for our cabin twice. The first time because the sat nav had what I can only describe as a small electronic breakdown. The second time because we were both staring at a moose that was staring back at us with the kind of judgemental expression I normally reserve for people who put milk in first.

By the time we found the right track, dusk was settling in that particular Norwegian way, where the light seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. The cabin sat among birch trees, red paint fading to the colour of old bricks, with a porch that sagged just enough to feel welcoming rather than alarming. My partner went to find the key box while I stood there in those ridiculous boots, listening to nothing. Absolute nothing. No traffic hum, no distant aeroplanes, just the wind moving through leaves and something that might have been a stream or might have been my imagination getting carried away.

Inside smelled of pine and something else, something older and more particular, like every holiday that had happened there before ours had left a thin layer of itself behind. We found the light switch eventually, after fumbling around in what I insisted was romantic atmospheric darkness and what my partner insisted was me being too proud to admit I couldn't see a thing.

The mishap with the boots became the pattern rather than the exception. Next morning we set out for what the map suggested was a gentle loop to a viewpoint. We took a wrong turning within twenty minutes. The path narrowed, then became something that could only generously be called a path, then became a series of orange markers tied to tree trunks that seemed to lead purposefully into increasingly improbable terrain. I was ready to turn back. My partner, who has never met a questionable route she didn't immediately prefer to the sensible one, pressed on.

That is how we found the lake. Not the lake everyone photographs, the one with the proper path and the bench. This one had no name that we could find, no marker, just water so still it looked like you could step onto it, surrounded by marshy ground that tried to steal my remaining dignity along with my footwear. We sat on a rock that was probably some ancient glacial leftover, sharing squashed sandwiches and watching a pair of divers that seemed completely unbothered by our intrusion.

The rest of the week continued in this fashion. The bakery in Gol that we only found because I needed a toilet and barged into what turned out to be a back entrance, emerging with cinnamon buns that ruined all other cinnamon buns forever. The swimming spot where the river pooled between smooth stones, discovered when our car got a puncture and we walked to the nearest farm for help. The farmer's wife, who spoke no English and laughed at my attempted Norwegian, then led us down a track I would never have noticed to show us where her grandchildren swam.

I kept thinking about intention, about how much of what I value arrives uninvited. The boots never did fit properly. I bought cheap replacements in a sports shop and left the others by the cabin door, an accidental offering to whoever came next. But I wore them for that first walk, and every wrong turning after, and I wonder now if I would have found any of it with sensible footwear and a working sat nav.

On our last evening we tried to retrace our steps to the nameless lake. We failed, naturally. The orange markers had vanished or perhaps had never existed in the places we searched. It felt right, though. Some things belong to the getting lost.