I have never been so grateful for a broken satnav in my life. There we were, trundling through the pine forests of Hedmark in our hire car, my other half jabbing at the screen while I pretended to know which turning we had missed. The robotic voice had given up on us entirely somewhere near Lillehammer, and we were officially, gloriously, lost.

Our destination was a cabin in Sjusjoen, which I had been pronouncing entirely wrong for the three months leading up to this trip. "Shoe-shun," I kept telling people confidently, like some sort of Scandinavian expert. The owner of the property later corrected me with the patience of someone who has heard this approximately four thousand times before.

The mishap came about twenty minutes after the satnav died. We spotted what I insisted was a shortcut down a gravel track. My other half, who knows better by now but never learns, humoured me. The track became a path, the path became mud, and the mud became a small frozen stream that we absolutely should not have attempted to cross. We spent forty minutes digging the car out with a borrowed shovel from a passing local, who found the whole thing so amusing he took a photograph before helping. I have never felt more British in my life, standing there in inadequate footwear, apologising to a Norwegian man who spoke better English than I do.

But here is the thing about being lost in Hedmark. You stumble upon places no brochure would ever send you. We found a clearing where someone had left a homemade bench facing nothing but birch trees and silence. We sat there for half an hour, too embarrassed to move, and watched a red squirrel perform what I can only describe as acrobatic criticism of our life choices. It was one of the best moments of the entire holiday.

By the time we finally reached the cabin, rattled and muddy and thoroughly humbled, the late afternoon light was doing that extraordinary thing it does in Norway, where everything turns gold and sharp-edged. The property sat among low hills with a view I later learned stretched toward the Sjusjoen skiing area, though in late autumn it was simply a vastness of purple shadow and pale sky. The cabin itself was modest and warm, the sort of place that smells immediately of wood resin and someone else's well-kept holiday memories.

I will not pretend the first evening was sophisticated. We ate supermarket meatballs standing at the kitchen counter, too tired to sit properly, watching darkness fall with the speed it does at that latitude. Every creak made us jump. We were town people, unaccustomed to the particular silence of a place with no road noise, no neighbour's television, nothing but the occasional shift of trees in wind we could not feel.

The next morning I woke before dawn, still confused by the time difference, and made the excellent decision to wander out without checking a map. This became the pattern of our stay. I found a lake the owner later identified as somewhere I definitely should not have reached without proper boots, its surface so still it held the mountains upside down. I found a cluster of wild blueberries, finished by birds mostly, but enough to stain my fingers and feel like discovery. I found a shed with a faded skis painted on it, abandoned decades ago, containing only a single left glove and a 1987 newspaper.

Each time I returned to the cabin slightly more dishevelled, slightly more triumphant, my other half would look up from whatever sensible activity they had pursued and raise an eyebrow. I had no photographs worth keeping. The light was always wrong, or my hands were too cold, or I was too busy being present in a way that does not translate to screens.

What I understood finally, on our last evening, was that the getting lost had been the point all along. The cabin was lovely, warm, exactly as advertised. But the holiday happened in the spaces between intentions, in the wrong turns and the frozen streams and the squirrel that judged me. I am not someone who naturally wanders without purpose. I like a plan, a list, a confirmed booking. Sjusjoen taught me that the best list is the one you abandon at the first interesting distraction, and that being slightly underprepared in beautiful country is its own kind of preparation.

We left the shovel in the car for the next victims. I pronounced the name correctly once, at the petrol station, and immediately reverted to my wrong version out of superstition. Some things you do not want to get entirely right, in case the magic notices and moves on.