I have never been so grateful for a wrong turn in my life. We had been driving from Sandefjord Airport for what felt like hours, though it was probably only forty minutes, when my partner announced with great confidence that he knew exactly where we were going. Reader, he did not. The sat nav had given up somewhere near a fjord, and we found ourselves bumping down a gravel track that grew narrower and more determined with every metre. I was just about to suggest we turn back when the trees parted and there it was: a wooden cabin perched on a hillside, looking out over nothing but forest and the distant glint of water. We had accidentally found someone else's holiday let, but it was enough to make us stop the car and laugh at our own ridiculousness. Properly lost, properly happy, and still with no idea where our actual Skrim cabin was hiding.

That is more or less how the entire week went. We did eventually locate our proper accommodation, a solid timber place with a red roof and a deck that creaked pleasantly underfoot, but by then we had already decided that getting lost was going to be the point of the holiday. Vestfold does not shout for attention like the fjords further north. It murmurs. It hides things down lanes that do not appear on maps, behind hedgerows that look impenetrable until you spot the gap where a dog has pushed through.

The morning after our arrival, we set out with no particular plan beyond walking until something interesting happened. We followed a path from near the cabin that seemed to lead nowhere, winding through birch forest where the light came through in stripes. After twenty minutes the trees opened onto a small lake we could not name, with a single wooden jetty and a rowing boat tied up and apparently abandoned. There was no sign, no car park, no indication that anyone else had stood there in weeks. We sat on that jetty for an hour, sharing a packet of biscuits that had gone soft in the car, and watched a heron stand completely still in the reeds. I kept expecting someone to appear and tell us we were trespassing. Nobody did.

Another afternoon, we took a road that looked like a driveway and ended at a farm selling strawberries from an unmanned honesty stall. The prices were written on a piece of cardboard held down by a stone. We left far too much money and ate the entire punnet before we reached the main road, our fingers stained red, feeling like children who had got away with something.

I should mention that I am not naturally someone who embraces uncertainty. I like a plan. I like knowing where the nearest supermarket is and whether the restaurant takes bookings. But there is something about Vestfold's particular quality of hiddenness that undoes that instinct. You cannot really get properly lost here, not dangerously so. The peninsula is too small, too edged by water on both sides. Eventually you hit a coast road or a village with a petrol station and you reorient yourself. The getting lost is playful, almost designed into the landscape.

On our third day we found a cove that I am still not convinced has a name. We had been driving vaguely south, missed a turning, corrected, missed it again because the sign was hidden by branches, and simply carried on to see where the lane ended. It ended at a patch of shingle with water so clear you could see the weed moving fifteen metres down. We swam despite the cold, emerging with our skin tight and our breath short, and dried off on rocks that had been warmed by a sun we had not expected.

The Skrim cabin itself became part of this accidental rhythm. We stopped trying to plan day trips to places we had read about. Instead we would set off in a direction, any direction, and see what the lanes delivered. Sometimes it was nothing much: a field of sheep, a view of distant hills, a moment of quiet that felt like the day's proper achievement. Other times it was something we would never have found deliberately, like the small harbour where an old man was repairing nets and told us, in broken English and gestures, about the mackerel run that week. We bought fish from him the next morning, cooked it simply on the cabin's hob, and ate it looking out at the same trees that had confused us so thoroughly on arrival.

By the end of the week I had stopped checking my phone for signal. I had stopped worrying about whether we were making the most of our time, seeing the right things, having the proper experiences. The mishap of that first wrong turn had become the holiday's entire philosophy. Vestfold had taught me, gently and without any particular effort, that sometimes the best thing you can do is not know where you are going. I am not sure I will manage to keep this wisdom when I am back in London, rushing for trains and counting minutes. But I have the memory of that unnamed lake, that honesty stall, that shingle cove, and they remind me that getting lost is not always a mistake. Sometimes it is the only way to find what you actually needed.