I will never forget the moment I realised my sat nav had developed what I can only describe as a vendetta against me. There I was, winding through Telemark with a boot full of groceries and a passenger seat piled with coats I definitely did not need, when the cheerful voice announced I had reached my destination. I had not. I was parked outside what appeared to be someone's woodshed, miles from anywhere that resembled the Gaustablikk cabin I had booked for the week. The woodshed owner, an elderly chap in wellies, watched me from his window with the resigned patience of someone who had seen this many times before. I reversed with what I hoped looked like confidence and promptly got my wheel stuck in a drainage ditch.

Two hours later, a farmer with a tractor named, I kid you not, "Bjorn's Revenge" had winched me out. I arrived at the actual Gaustablikk after dark, muddy, starving, and wondering why I had not simply gone to Cornwall like a normal person.

But here is the thing about getting properly lost. The next morning, still rattled from my woodland misadventure, I decided to walk in literally any direction the sat nav did not suggest. I struck out from the cabin along a track that looked more used by moose than humans. The Gaustablikk area sits beneath the famous mountain, yes, but I was not heading for the famous bits. I wanted the nothing bits, the between places.

I found them. Twenty minutes of walking brought me to a small lake I later learned has no official name, or at least none that anyone bothers with. The locals apparently call it "the wet bit behind Einar's field." I sat on a rock and watched a heron stand completely still for so long I started to worry about it. The water was that particular Norwegian colour, not quite green, not quite grey, like someone had asked an artist to paint "melancholy" and they had got carried away.

The real discovery came when I tried to shortcut back and ended up deeper in the forest than before. I stumbled across a clearing where someone, decades ago, had built a tiny wooden shelter. No signage, no path to it, just weathered planks and a stone fire circle. Inside, scratched into the wood, were dozens of names and dates going back to the 1960s. A hidden guestbook. I added mine, feeling oddly emotional about this accidental community of the lost.

That became my pattern for the week. Each day I would set out with a vague notion, get confused by a fork in a track, and find something no brochure mentioned. A waterfall that roared so loud I walked past it twice without seeing it, hidden in a gorge like a secret. A cluster of wild raspberry bushes where I stood eating until my fingers stained purple and a passing dog looked at me with clear judgement. A viewpoint where the mountain Gausta revealed itself not in its usual dramatic full form, but peeking through cloud gaps like a shy celebrity.

The cabin itself became part of this accidental rhythm. I had booked it for its practicalities, the sauna and the fireplace and the proper kitchen. But I grew fond of its quirks instead. The window that would not quite shut, meaning I fell asleep to proper forest sounds. The tap that needed a specific angry twist. The way the morning light hit the living room at exactly half past eight, briefly making the ordinary furniture look like it belonged in a design magazine.

I spoke to almost no one, which suited me. A woman in the village shop explained, without my asking, that the area used to have more farms, that young people left, that things change slowly here if they change at all. She gave me a cheese I did not request and said it was "for the walking." It was excellent cheese. I ate it on a hillside I never found again, despite several attempts.

By the end of the week, my sat nav and I had reached an understanding. I stopped using it entirely. The mishap that began my trip had become the gift that defined it. Getting lost, properly lost, not the anxious city kind but the soft, slow, who-knows-where-this-goes kind, had shown me a Telemark that felt like mine alone. Not the postcard version, but the real, slightly scruffy, unexpectedly generous place underneath.

On my final morning, I returned to the nameless lake. The heron was there again, or perhaps a different heron with the same commitment to stillness. I sat on my rock and thought about how close I had come to a very different holiday, one where I ticked sights off a list and never once parked in a drainage ditch. I would not trade a minute of it. Some things you can only find when you are not looking for them, and some places only appear when you have gone wrong enough to deserve them.