I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I put the postcode into my sat nav and it suggested I drive through what turned out to be someone's vegetable patch. Three hours out of Oslo, winding through Buskerud's forests, and there I was apologising to a very confused Norwegian chap who was holding a rake and looking at me like I'd just landed from Mars.

The proper road to Omholtfjell, as I eventually discovered, was the one with the actual tarmac. Revolutionary, I know.

But here's the thing about getting properly lost in Skrim's backcountry - it stops being frightening and starts becoming brilliant. That wrong turn took me past a lake so still it looked like someone had laid a mirror across the valley. I still don't know its proper name. The chap with the rake, whose English was approximately as good as my Norwegian (nonexistent), communicated through pointing and vigorous nodding that yes, this was nice, and no, I definitely couldn't camp there.

The cabin itself, when I finally found it, was one of those red wooden places that looks like it's grown out of the hillside rather than been built on it. My first impression was mostly relief that I wouldn't be sleeping in the hire car. My second was the smell - that particular combination of pine, old woodsmoke, and something faintly metallic that I've decided is the scent of Norwegian holidays.

I dumped my bags and did what any sensible person would do: went wandering without a map.

The trail behind the cabin looked official enough for about fifty metres, then became something that was definitely just a sheep track. I followed it anyway, because that's the whole point, isn't it? Twenty minutes of mildly concerning bushwhacking later, I stumbled into a clearing with a stream running through it and a flat rock that someone, at some point, had clearly used as a picnic spot. There were still faint charcoal marks. I sat there for an hour watching the light change on the opposite hillside, feeling smug about my discovery, before noticing the faint trail marker on a tree I'd walked straight past.

Turns out I'd found something marked after all. Just not by me.

The next morning I got lost more deliberately. Took what I thought was a loop path near the Skrim foothills, missed a turning somewhere, and ended up at a small lake that doesn't appear on any of the tourist maps I'd looked at. It was full of fish jumping at midges. I sat on a fallen log and ate the sandwich I'd packed, feeling like the first person to ever discover this place, which I absolutely wasn't. There were boot prints in the mud. Still, in that moment, it felt like mine.

Getting lost became the whole rhythm of the trip. Each day I'd set out with vague intentions and return with stories of accidental clearings, unexpected viewpoints, and once, memorably, a small wooden shelter that I initially thought was abandoned before realising someone had carefully repaired the roof quite recently. I never saw who. I left a chocolate bar on the windowsill as thanks, and it was gone the next day.

There's something about this landscape that rewards the uncertain. The proper paths are fine, well-maintained, sensible. But the spaces between them, the bits where you think you've gone wrong, that's where Buskerud shows you something properly yours.

On my final evening, I got lost one last time. Took a turning too early on the way back from a longer walk, found myself on a gravel track that kept narrowing, until I emerged at a viewpoint I'd somehow missed on every previous day. The whole valley opened up, layers of forest fading into blue distance, and I understood why someone had bothered to clear this particular spot.

I sat there until the midges drove me back, thinking about how much of my life I've spent trying not to get lost, and how much I've been missing.

The sat nav got me back to Oslo without incident. I didn't trust it for a second.