Getting to Sortland involved a ferry, two buses, and what I can only describe as a catastrophic misunderstanding with a hire car sat nav that apparently thought "Nordland" was a suggestion rather than a destination. I ended up down a gravel track so narrow that my wing mirrors were practically grazing the bracken on both sides, convinced I'd discovered a shortcut. Reader, I had not. What I'd discovered was a farmer's private access road and, eventually, a very patient man in a tractor who directed me back to civilisation with the kind of weary smile that suggested I was not the first lost Brit he'd rescued.

By the time I actually reached the holiday home, my nerves were frayed and my dignity was somewhere back near that tractor. But then I opened the door, and something shifted. The place sat there so quietly, so unbothered by my chaos, with huge windows framing mountains that looked almost embarrassed by their own grandeur. I dumped my bags, made a cup of tea that tasted like proper redemption, and decided the only sensible response to my earlier navigational disaster was to get deliberately lost all over again.

That's how I found the shoreline path. No signpost, no trail marker, just a gap in the birch trees behind the house that looked vaguely inviting. I followed it on instinct, scrambling over mossy rocks and through patches of wild blueberry that stained my fingers purple. Ten minutes in, I was already beyond anywhere the map acknowledged. Twenty minutes, and the trees opened onto a pebble beach curved like a half-moon, with water so still it looked like you could walk across it. I sat on a driftwood log for an hour, watching oystercatchers probe the shallows, feeling smug in that particular way you only feel when you've stumbled into something with zero planning whatsoever.

The next morning I tried to repeat the trick, heading out with no destination and a packed lunch that was mostly just cheese. I took a left where common sense said right, following a stream uphill through terrain that got progressively more theatrical - first gentle meadow, then proper rocky outcrop, then suddenly this plateau where the ground was spongy with reindeer moss and the view just dropped away to reveal islands scattered across the fjord like someone had tossed them there casually. I ate my cheese on a boulder, legs dangling, genuinely unable to remember the last time I'd felt so pleased with my own terrible sense of direction.

What struck me, wandering those accidental routes, was how Sortland doesn't announce itself. There's no grand tourism infrastructure coaxing you toward designated viewpoints. You simply have to be willing to look foolish, to walk past the point where the path officially ends, to trust that getting slightly worried about where you are is often the precursor to finding somewhere worth being.

On my final evening, I got lost one last time. Took a wrong turning on what I thought was my now-familiar route back from that pebble beach, ended up in a small clearing where someone had built a tiny wooden bench facing the water. No plaque, no explanation, just a perfect seat positioned for the sunset. I watched the sky turn that particular Arctic pink that makes you feel briefly emotional about geology, and I thought about how my whole trip had been one long mistake that kept correcting itself into something better.

I never did learn to read a map properly. But I left Sortland with something more useful: the conviction that being lost isn't failure, it's just the world offering you a different version of where you thought you were going.