I have always believed that the best holidays are the ones where you accidentally take a wrong turn and end up somewhere brilliant. My recent trip to Heidal in Oppland, Norway, proved this theory beyond all doubt, though the initial mishap was less "brilliant discovery" and more "mild panic in a hire car."

The journey from Oslo had been going suspiciously well. Smooth motorway, stunning scenery, my partner dozing peacefully beside me with a packet of crisps balanced on her lap. I was feeling rather smug about my navigation skills, having dismissed her offer to use the sat nav. "I have got this," I told her, tapping my temple. Famous last words.

Somewhere after Vinstra, I took what I thought was a scenic shortcut. The tarmac became gravel. The gravel became something that can only be described as "optimistic dirt." My partner woke up, looked out at the increasingly wild landscape, and said simply, "You have done a thing, haven't you?" I had indeed done a thing. The car bottomed out on a particularly enthusiastic pothole, and we found ourselves in a clearing surrounded by birch trees, with no signal, no map, and a slowly deflating sense of masculine competence.

We decided to walk. This is how we discovered the first of our accidental treasures: a tiny stave church, barely signposted, tucked behind a cluster of farm buildings. It turned out to be a sister church to the more famous one in Heidal proper, but this one had no gift shop, no coach parties, just a weathered door and a local man cutting his grass who nodded at us as if strangers wandering from the woods were perfectly ordinary. We sat on a bench outside, shared the emergency chocolate digestives I keep in the glovebox for precisely such emergencies, and felt rather pleased with ourselves.

The walk back to the car took us along a stream I later learned was part of the Sjoa river system. We followed it without purpose, stumbling upon a series of small pools where the water ran impossibly clear over rust-coloured stones. My partner, who had been moderately unimpressed with my navigation, suddenly declared this the highlight of her year. She was right. There was something almost embarrassing about how beautiful it was, how completely unplanned, how we would never have found it had I not been so confidently wrong.

By the time we actually reached our Heidal cabin - the proper one, with the red paint and the traditional grass roof that the website had promised - we were several hours late, covered in mud, and carrying a pocketful of stones we had collected from the riverbed like overexcited children. The owner, a practical woman named Astrid, simply handed us the keys and said, "You took the long way, then?" Everyone in Heidal, it seems, knows about the long way.

The cabin itself was everything we had hoped: simple, warm, with a wood-burning stove that demanded constant attention and rewarded it with crackling comfort. But the truth is, I remember the wrong turns more vividly. The overgrown path we followed the next morning, purely because a goat had looked at us in a challenging manner. The abandoned ski hut we found when a rain shower sent us scrambling for cover, where someone had left a guestbook dating back to 1987, full of Norwegian handwriting and the occasional pressed flower.

On our final evening, we walked from the cabin with no destination in mind, took another unmarked track, and found ourselves overlooking a valley we had not seen before. The light was doing that particular Norwegian thing where everything looks slightly golden and unreal. My partner took my hand, which she does rarely enough that I notice every time, and said, "I am glad you are rubbish at directions."

I am rubbish at directions. This is an established fact, supported by decades of evidence. But standing there, slightly lost and completely content, I wondered if perhaps I have been too hard on myself. There is a particular joy in not knowing where you are, in trusting that the path continues somewhere worthwhile, in discovering that your mistakes have delivered you somewhere you needed to be. The world is full of hidden corners waiting for someone incompetent enough to wander into them.

We never did find that stave church again on a map. I have tried, in the months since, to locate it precisely, to pin down our route, to make sense of our wanderings. Some part of me is glad I cannot. It exists now only in memory, unspoiled by coordinates or reviews, a place that belongs entirely to that afternoon and to no one else. That feels right. Some discoveries should remain slightly lost.