I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I managed to put diesel in a petrol hire car at Oslo Airport. The chap at the rental desk looked at me with the kind of pity usually reserved for people who forget their own postcode, and forty minutes later I was finally trundling northwest in a slightly less shiny Volvo, smelling faintly of embarrassment and hand sanitiser.

The drive to Golsfjellet was proper Norway, the sort that makes you want to pull over every five minutes just to gawp. Mountains like sleeping giants, valleys holding onto the last stubborn snow patches even in late May, and those red wooden houses dotting the hillsides like someone had scattered a box of matches across a green carpet. I had the windows down and was feeling rather pleased with myself until the satnav gave up entirely somewhere past Gol, leaving me with nothing but a paper map I'd nicked from the airport and a growing suspicion I was going the wrong way.

This is where it gets interesting, because getting lost on Golsfjellet is not like getting lost round the M25. I took a wrong turn at what I thought was a junction, ended up on a gravel track that grew narrower and more optimistic by the metre, and suddenly found myself in a clearing with a view that made me actually say "blimey" out loud. No signposts, no other cars, just a small lake so still it looked like someone had laid a mirror on the ground. I later learned this was one of dozens of unnamed tarns up there, the sort of place locals probably fish without telling anyone.

The cabin itself, when I finally found it, was tucked into a slope with a deck that seemed to hover over the valley. But I am getting ahead of myself, because the real discovery came the next morning when I set off for what I thought was a marked walking route and instead spent three hours wandering through birch forest that grew thicker and more conspiratorial the further I went. I had no phone signal, a flask of coffee that went cold, and absolutely no idea where I was. It was brilliant.

I stumbled across a clearing where someone had clearly camped years ago, fire ring still visible, and beyond it a stream running over flat rocks that made natural slides. I sat there for an hour with my feet in freezing water, watching a bird I couldn't identify doing something complicated with a pine cone. The entire time, I saw not a single other person.

Later in the week, I found a farm shop by simply driving down a road that looked "interesting," which is my partner's least favourite navigation strategy. The woman running it spoke barely any English and I speak no Norwegian whatsoever, but through pointing and enthusiastic nodding I came away with brown cheese, some reindeer sausage, and a jar of cloudberry jam that I have been rationing like it is gold bullion ever since.

The thing about Golsfjellet is that it does not really do "attractions" in the British sense. There is no gift shop, no audio guide, no car park with a height barrier. What it has instead is space to get properly, gloriously lost, and the quiet reward of finding something that feels like it belongs only to you for that moment. I spent one afternoon following a stream uphill on a whim, reasoning that water goes somewhere, and found a waterfall that does not appear on any map I have since checked. I ate my packed lunch sitting on a rock, getting dripped on and not caring one bit.

By the end of the week, I had stopped checking my phone for signal altogether. I had also stopped worrying about whether I was doing the holiday "correctly," which is a particular anxiety of mine that usually involves checking reviews and making sure I have not missed the "best" restaurant or view. Golsfjellet cured me of this partly by not giving me any choice, and partly by teaching me that the best view is often the one you find when you are genuinely not sure where you are.

On my last morning, I got lost one final time trying to find the route back to the main road and ended up on a ridge watching cloud shadows move across the valley like slow hands on a clock. I thought about the diesel incident, the useless satnav, the cold coffee, the bird with the pine cone. I thought about how often I plan things to death and how rarely that planning actually delivers anything worth remembering.

I drove back to Oslo without getting lost once, which felt almost like a betrayal.