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 little place called Flatnes in Sveio, Hordaland, proved this theory beyond all doubt. Though I should probably start with the bit where I nearly drove into a fjord.

The journey from Bergen was meant to take about an hour and a half. I had my phone mounted on the dashboard, a packet of stale liquorice allsorts rolling around the passenger seat, and that particular brand of overconfidence that comes from having successfully navigated a Norwegian hire car for a full twenty minutes. The sat nav had other ideas. Somewhere near the E39 it decided I absolutely needed to experience what I can only describe as a glorified tractor path. I found myself bouncing along something called, if I squinted at the sign correctly, a "scenic route." It was certainly scenic. It was also barely wide enough for a determined sheep.

The mishap came at what I thought was a turning point. I reversed to let a local in a battered Volvo pass, misjudged the camber entirely, and felt my rear wheel sink with an ominous crunch into what I initially feared was water but turned out to be gloriously thick Norwegian mud. The Volvo driver, a chap called Arne who spoke approximately twelve words of English and used all of them to laugh at me, produced a tow rope from his boot with the practised ease of a man who had clearly done this before. Possibly that morning. We established through gestures and my terrible pronunciation of "takk" that I owed him a beer, and he pointed me toward a path I would never have found otherwise.

That path led me, eventually and rather muddy, to the holiday home at Flatnes. But more importantly, it led me to a mindset. I stopped trusting the technology and started trusting the wrong turns.

The property itself sits in that satisfying spot where you feel properly tucked away without being entirely uncivilised. I arrived far later than planned, still smelling vaguely of fjord-adjacent mud, and spent my first evening simply sitting on the terrace watching the light do extraordinary things across the water. The Sveio area is all about those in-between spaces, the bits that proper tourists blast past on their way to somewhere more obviously impressive.

I spent the next few days deliberately getting lost. Not dangerously lost. Pleasantly, rewardingly lost. I took the small road that looked like it went nowhere and found a tiny pebble beach where someone had stacked stones into a precarious tower that must have taken hours. I followed a walking path that started promisingly and then simply stopped in a meadow, as if the person building it had got bored or been distracted by berries. The meadow was full of them. I ate far too many and spent the evening slightly concerned I had poisoned myself, which felt appropriately adventurous.

One morning I drove what I thought was a loop back toward the main road and ended up at a small harbour where three elderly gentlemen were repairing nets with the unhurried precision of people who had never once checked a watch. They let me watch in silence, which was generous of them, and one eventually offered me coffee from a thermos that had probably seen better decades. We discussed, as far as I could follow, the relative merits of different cloud formations for predicting fish behaviour. I understood perhaps one word in ten but felt genuinely included.

The thing about these accidental discoveries is that they resist being planned or replicated. I could tell you roughly where that harbour was, but I would struggle to find it again myself. I suspect that is rather the point. The holiday home at Flatnes became my base camp for small daily expeditions into uncertainty, and the uncertainty was always more rewarding than anything I could have researched.

By the end of the week I had developed an almost superstitious aversion to correct navigation. I took wrong turns on purpose. I followed signs to places I could not pronounce. I found a small waterfall that I am almost certain does not appear on any map, mainly because I slipped on a wet rock while photographing it and sat in the stream for several undignified minutes. No witnesses. Just me, the water, and the slow realisation that my waterproof trousers were not as waterproof as advertised.

What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that Flatnes and the Sveio area gave me something I did not know I needed. Permission to be slightly incompetent. Encouragement to follow the unmarked path. The understanding that getting properly, thoroughly, perhaps even dangerously lost is sometimes the only way to find something that feels genuinely yours. I returned the hire car with mud still visible in places the cleaning crew will probably never discover. I consider it a small tribute.