The thing about driving to Fosen is that you think you've got it sorted, right up until you haven't. I'd been smugly following the sat nav for three hours from Trondheim, congratulating myself on how Norwegian I'd become, when I took what I absolutely insist was a suggested shortcut and ended up on a gravel track that grew narrower, then muddier, then apparently became someone's private driveway. I stopped to reverse just as a tractor appeared behind me, driven by a man who looked like he'd been expecting this exact scenario since approximately 1987. He didn't even roll his eyes. Just pointed back the way I'd come, made a left-right-left gesture, and carried on. I reversed for what felt like a mile. My hire car now has a scratch I cannot explain to the rental company with any dignity whatsoever.

But here's the curious thing about that wrong turn. I'd spotted a small wooden sign, half-hidden by brambles, pointing toward something called "Gammelveien" - Old Road. And later that evening, settled into the cabin at Fosen with a cup of something warm and medicinal, I found myself unable to stop thinking about it.

The cabin itself was everything the photos promised and nothing like them at the same time. Cosier, somehow. More weathered. The sort of place where you keep discovering doors that lead to unexpected storeys, or windows that frame views you hadn't noticed were there. I spent my first morning just wandering between rooms, watching the light change over Bjugnfjorden through panes that had clearly witnessed decades of Norwegian weather doing its worst.

On day two, I went looking for that Old Road again. Found it this time, though only because I parked where I definitely shouldn't have and walked. The path climbed through birch forest, then broke suddenly into open hillside where sheep stared at me with that particular contempt sheep reserve for humans who've clearly lost their way. I had, of course. The path forked, then forked again, and I chose each direction based on nothing more scientific than which looked less maintained. This is not a strategy I recommend generally. Here, though, it worked.

I stumbled onto a small lake, nameless as far as I could tell, with a single wooden bench positioned as if someone had once intended to return regularly and then simply never bothered. The water was that particular grey-green of Norwegian freshwater, utterly still, reflecting clouds that moved too fast for their own reflections to keep pace. I sat for an hour. A fish jumped once, leaving ripples that outlasted my patience for watching them fade.

The getting lost became, deliberately, the point. Each morning I'd set out with a rough direction and no particular destination. A coastal path that petered out into sheep-cropped grass led me to a tiny harbour where three boats sat chained to a concrete ramp, apparently waiting for something none of us could name. A lane I took thinking it was a through-road deposited me at a farm gate where an elderly woman, without any preamble, offered me coffee and told me about the German soldiers who'd briefly occupied her grandfather's barn in 1940. She'd been perhaps eight when he died. She remembered his stories better than her own childhood.

There's something particular about rural Norway that encourages this kind of meandering, I think. The infrastructure exists - roads, paths, the occasional helpful sign - but it's not insistent. It permits wandering without quite facilitating it. You need to make your own mistakes, your own discoveries.

By my fourth day, I'd developed a strange pride in my accumulated wrong turns. The scratch on the car had become, in my mind, a sort of credential. The time I'd walked an extra hour because I'd misread a map and followed a stream instead of a path - that became the afternoon I found the abandoned rowing boat, half-submerged in reeds, that I photographed obsessively and cannot quite explain why.

On my final morning, I tried to find that nameless lake again. Failed, naturally. Found instead a different viewpoint, different sheep, different stillness. The Fosen cabin sat waiting, indifferent to my comings and goings, warm when I returned. I left the next day with directions carefully written, routes properly planned, and the certain knowledge that I'd ignore them completely if I ever came back.