I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a minor disaster, and our trip to Stranda in More og Romsdal did not disappoint. We had flown into Alesund, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of fish and optimism, and set off along the E39 with a sat nav that clearly had a grudge against us. Within forty minutes we were hopelessly lost on a gravel track that wound through birch forest, the kind of road that makes you question every life choice that led you to this moment. My partner, ever the navigator, insisted we press on because the map showed a shortcut. Reader, there was no shortcut. There was only a very steep hill, a sheep with judgmental eyes, and the slow realisation that we would need to reverse half a mile to find anywhere to turn around.

By the time we reached the holiday home, perched above the Storfjord with views that made me forget my white-knuckle terror, I was ready to weep with relief. The place itself was a traditional Norwegian cabin, all dark wood and practical cosiness, with a deck that seemed to float above the water. But the real magic, I discovered, came from surrendering to being lost.

The next morning, still rattled by our arrival, I set out on what was meant to be a gentle stroll to the local shop. I took a wrong turn almost immediately, following a path that narrowed and climbed through blueberry bushes and moss-covered rock. The sat nav sat abandoned in my pocket. Within twenty minutes I found myself in a small clearing where an elderly man was tending a smokehouse, the kind used for curing fish in the old way. He spoke no English, I spoke no Norwegian beyond "takk," and yet he pressed a piece of warm smoked trout into my hands and gestured for me to sit on a stump. We shared that fish in companionable silence, watching mist drift across the fjord, and I thought about how rarely I allow myself to be properly lost.

My partner found me two hours later, slightly frantic, having walked the same road three times. I returned with trout oil on my fingers and a new philosophy.

We spent the rest of the week deliberately wandering. A path behind the cabin led to a tiny beach of smooth grey stones where we swam in water so cold it felt like being slapped by nature itself. Another wrong turn on a drive to what we thought was a viewpoint took us to a family-run farm where they sold cheese from a shed with an honesty box. The cheese was sharp and crumbly, nothing like anything I had tasted, and we ate it on the bonnet of the car while clouds moved like herds across the mountains above us.

One evening, chasing the last light, we stumbled upon a small wooden church, locked but surrounded by gravestones so old the moss had swallowed the names. I sat on the step and watched my partner photograph the fjord turning gold and then violet, and I felt something shift in me, some need to always be arriving somewhere specific.

The fish-scented car, the sheep, the smokehouse, the cheese shed, the nameless dead. These were the gifts of getting it wrong. On our final morning I walked that gravel track again, the one that had terrified me on arrival, and found it led to a waterfall I never would have discovered otherwise. I stood there with spray on my face and laughed at the version of myself who had cursed this road a week before.

We left Stranda with a boot full of cheese, a new appreciation for the word "takk," and the certain knowledge that our best memories had come from every moment we had not planned.