I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I missed the turning for Sjusjoen twice in the same afternoon. The first time I blame on Google Maps having a moment, the second time I blame entirely on a very distracting bakery in Lillehammer that had krumkake in the window. By the time I actually found the right road, my hire car had collected enough gravel on its underside to sound like a maraca band every time I went over thirty miles an hour.

The journey up from Oslo had been gorgeous in that slightly threatening Norwegian way, all dark pines and sudden glimpses of water that looked too cold to even think about. I had been aiming for what the listing called a "traditional mountain cabin" and was half-expecting something with a grass roof and a family of elk living in the annex. What I found instead, after one final wrong turn that deposited me on a forestry track where I had to reverse for nearly a mile, was a red wooden house perched on a slope with views that made me forget I had been driving in circles for the better part of two hours.

The key was in a lockbox, which I promptly dropped into a snowdrift that turned out to be deeper than it looked. Fishing it out involved lying across the porch railing in a position that would have been deeply undignified if anyone had been watching, which thankfully they were not, unless you count a very judgemental crow in the birch tree. The door opened with a satisfying creak and I stepped inside to the smell of wood and something faintly vanilla from the cleaning products, which was a considerable upgrade from the petrol station coffee that had sustained me since Gardermoen.

I will be honest, my first act as a responsible adult in this new environment was to trip over the threshold and nearly flatten myself against the wood-burning stove. The second was to notice that the windows framed a view of forest and distant hills that looked almost indecently picturesque, like someone had painted it to make me feel smug about my holiday choices. The cabin was simple in the best way, all pine walls and practical furniture and a kitchen that clearly expected me to actually cook rather than just microwave things, which felt like an accusation I was not prepared to address.

The funny thing about arriving somewhere after getting properly lost is that you notice different things. I spent that first evening not doing any of the sensible unpacking or grocery planning, but instead walking in increasingly wide circles around the property until I found a path I had not seen from the road. It led down through birch trees to a small lake I later learned was not even named on most maps, just a dark oval of water with a single wooden bench someone had placed there years ago and left to weather silver-grey. I sat there until the mosquitoes found me, which took approximately four minutes, and then I sat there a bit longer because I am stubborn and the light was doing something extraordinary across the water.

That bench became my secret for the week, though "secret" is probably generous when I suspect half the locals knew about it and simply could not be bothered to walk down in the drizzle. I found other things by accident too, because my sense of direction remained reliably terrible. A shed selling homemade jam with an honesty box that I nearly missed behind a hedge. A trail that was definitely meant for cross-country skiing in winter but worked perfectly well for wandering in July, provided you did not mind the occasional boggy patch that tried to steal your shoe.

The mishap of getting lost on arrival stopped feeling like a mishap and started feeling like the whole point. I had planned to be efficient, to tick off sights and drive to lookouts and generally behave like someone who had read a guidebook. Instead I spent my days following paths that petered out, finding viewpoints that existed only for me in that moment, and returning to the cabin with boots full of heather and a slightly dazed expression that the woman in the nearest supermarket clearly recognised as the look of someone who had been wandering about without purpose.

On my last morning I tried to find that nameless lake again and took a wrong turning that led me instead to a clearing where someone had stacked firewood into a structure that looked almost like a tiny chapel. I never did figure out who built it or why. I sat on a stump and ate the last of my krumkake from Lillehammer, slightly stale now but still excellent, and thought about how the best things on that trip had been the ones I was not looking for. The cabin itself, the unexpected lake, the firewood chapel, even the judgemental crow in the birch tree, all found because I was not very good at following instructions and Norway was generous enough to reward that particular failing.

I left the key in the lockbox without dropping it this time, which felt like growth of a sort. The car still rattled with gravel all the way back to Oslo, and I took one more wrong turning almost immediately, which led me past a farm selling smoked fish from a shed. I stopped, obviously, because I had learned by then that wrong turnings were where the good stuff lived.