I have always believed that the best holidays are the ones where you accidentally take a wrong turn and find something brilliant. My recent trip to a cabin in Trysil, Hedmark, proved this theory beyond all doubt, though the journey there did not start auspiciously.

We had been driving up from Oslo, which should have been straightforward enough. My partner was navigating, I was driving, and somewhere around Elverum we managed to turn what should have been a simple three-hour trip into a four-and-a-half-hour odyssey of petty bickering and spectacular misdirection. The sat nav decided to send us down what I can only describe as a glorified tractor path. There was a moment, approximately twenty minutes in, when we encountered a sheep standing in the middle of the track with an expression of profound disappointment. I am fairly certain it was judging our life choices.

By the time we finally found the proper road to Trysil, tempers were frayed. Then we missed the turning for our cabin. Twice. The second time we ended up at what appeared to be a closed-down ski hire place, surrounded by nothing but pine trees and the growing suspicion that we were not cut out for rural Norwegian life.

But here is where it gets interesting. On our third attempt to locate the cabin, we took yet another wrong turning and stumbled upon a tiny lake that was not on any map I could find later. It sat there like a secret, perfectly still, with a rough wooden bench someone had clearly built by hand. We sat there for half an hour, eating the emergency packet of biscuits we had bought at a petrol station in Hamar, and something shifted. The panic of being lost dissolved into something else entirely.

The cabin itself, when we finally found it, was charming in that solid, unpretentious Scandinavian way. But I will be honest: the discoveries we made by accident over the next few days eclipsed anything we had deliberately planned.

On our first morning, we set out for what we thought was a marked walking trail and ended up on a narrow path through birch forest that led to a clearing with the remains of an old charcoal pit. A local we met later told us these were common in the area but rarely signposted for tourists. We had it completely to ourselves, standing there imagining nineteenth-century workers in a landscape that probably looked much the same.

Another afternoon, attempting to find the supposedly famous Trysil bike park, we took a left where we should have taken a right and found ourselves at a small farm selling homemade goat cheese and cloudberry jam from an unmanned honesty box. The cheese was extraordinary. The bike park, when we eventually located it the following day, was perfectly fine. I preferred the cheese.

There was the swimming spot we found by following a narrow track that looked like it led nowhere, which it technically did, except to a perfect little pebble beach on the Trysil River where the water moved just fast enough to be thrilling but not dangerous. We spent an entire afternoon there, watching kingfishers dart about and feeling terribly smug about our accidental discovery.

The thing about getting lost in Hedmark is that the landscape is forgiving. The forests are dense but not threatening, the hills roll rather than intimidate, and everywhere there is the sense that people have lived gently with this terrain for centuries. We found abandoned hay barns, a tiny chapel that seated perhaps twenty people, and one evening, completely by mistake, we drove into what appeared to be a local gathering at a community hall where someone was grilling sausages outside and playing seventies Norwegian pop from a portable speaker. We were invited to join without question. My Norwegian extends to approximately twelve words, most of them food-related, but sausage and goodwill need no translation.

By the end of the week, we had abandoned the guidebook entirely. Each morning we would set out with a vague direction and a willingness to be wrong. The best meal we had was at a place we found after taking a turning simply because the road looked interesting. The best view came from a hill we climbed because we had parked in the wrong place for something else entirely.

I think there is a particular joy in accidental discovery that planned tourism cannot replicate. The satisfaction is deeper somehow, tinged with the memory of uncertainty and the small triumph of finding your way. Standing on that unmapped hill, looking out over forests that seemed to stretch to Sweden, I felt something I rarely feel on holiday: a sense of genuine connection to a place, earned rather than purchased.

We did eventually find our way back to Oslo without major incident, though we did take one final wrong turning that led us to a village bakery of such excellence that we bought an entire cinnamon loaf to eat in the car. Some habits, once formed, are worth keeping.

I have since tried to apply this philosophy elsewhere, with mixed results. Getting lost in Birmingham city centre on a rainy Tuesday does not hold quite the same romance. But in Trysil, surrounded by forests and lakes and the occasional judgmental sheep, being lost felt like being found.