The thing about driving to Sjusjoen is that you think you've got it sorted. Sat nav charged, playlist ready, that smug feeling of being properly organised. Then you hit the Norwegian countryside and realise your phone thinks you're in a fjord somewhere near Sweden. I spent a good forty minutes circling what I can only describe as a very aggressive-looking sheep farm before admitting defeat and asking a man filling his car at a petrol station. He pointed me back the way I'd come, laughed in that wonderfully direct Norwegian way, and said something about tourists and summer roads that I chose to interpret charitably.

By the time I actually found the cabin, I'd developed what I can only call a complicated relationship with my hire car's handbrake and a deep respect for anyone who navigates these forest tracks regularly. The property sat among birch trees with that particular hush you only get in proper wilderness, all timber cladding and red paint fading to that perfect weathered shade. My first impression, standing there with my suitcase wheels clogged with pine needles, was that I'd accidentally gatecrashed someone's very private idea of heaven.

I hadn't planned on getting lost that first evening. The intention was a gentle stroll to stretch my legs after all that driving, perhaps find the lake I'd read about. The path started obligingly enough, wide and well-trodden past neighbouring cabins where people sat on decks with that Scandinavian contentment that makes you feel simultaneously envious and inadequate. Then I spotted a narrower track branching uphill, marked by nothing more than a stone that looked vaguely arrow-shaped if you squinted. Reader, I squinted.

The forest swallowed me within minutes. Not in a threatening way, more like being invited into a conversation you'd misunderstood but were too polite to leave. The birch gave way to spruce, the light turned that particular green-gold that filters through needle canopy, and every instinct said to turn back. Every instinct except the one that makes holidays interesting, obviously.

I found the clearing by accident, or perhaps the clearing found me. A small meadow where someone long ago had stacked stones into a rough bench, overlooking a stream I'd never have known existed. No signposts, no paths leading to it, just this perfectly composed little scene of water and late light that felt almost embarrassingly private. I sat on those uneven stones until the midges reminded me I was still technically a human with blood, and even then I dawdled, memorising the way the water moved over rust-coloured rocks.

The walk back took longer than it should because I refused to use my phone, determined to navigate by some newly discovered internal compass that proved about as reliable as my sat nav. I emerged onto a gravel road I'd never seen, followed it past a barn where an elderly man was splitting wood with mechanical precision, and eventually recognised the bend near the cabin from a completely unexpected angle. He nodded as I passed. I nodded back. Neither of us mentioned that I was clearly not where I thought I was.

That became the pattern of the week, if I'm honest. The planned walks were pleasant enough, well-marked trails through terrain that shifted between proper forest and the more open, almost Scottish feel of the higher ground near Sjusjoen lake itself. But the accidental discoveries stayed with me. The small beach where no one else appeared, reached by taking a wrong turn at a junction I still couldn't reliably identify. The abandoned ski hut with its door hanging open and a guestbook inside dating back to the eighties, full of handwriting from people who'd also wandered in from nowhere particular. I added my name with a pen that barely worked, feeling like I'd joined something slightly secret.

There's a particular quality to getting lost in a place like Hedmark, where the wilderness is substantial enough to feel genuine but not so vast that you're actually in danger. The anxiety comes and goes, replaced by something more interesting: a kind of attentive uncertainty. You start noticing things differently. The way moss grows thicker on one side of a tree, the particular silence that means water nearby, the subtle flattening of undergrowth that suggests others have passed this way before, though not recently.

I found the blueberry patch on my last morning, having set out deliberately without map or phone, walking until the path I'd intended to follow simply stopped existing. The berries were past their best, slightly wrinkled and concentrated in flavour, and I stood there in my inadequate shoes, fingers staining purple, eating them without any particular purpose. A woodpecker hammered somewhere out of sight. The forest did its green-gold thing with the light. I thought about how I'd arrived, how lost I'd felt, how that feeling had transformed into something I was actively seeking out by the end.

The drive back to the airport was uneventful, sat nav behaving itself with suspicious compliance. I passed the sheep farm again, recognised it with something approaching affection. The man at the petrol station wasn't there, or perhaps I didn't notice, already half-converted back to someone who checks their phone every few minutes and considers getting lost a minor inconvenience rather than a small, private triumph. Some places do that to you, I think. They let you believe for a while that wandering without purpose might be the most purposeful thing you do all year.