I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and my trip to Kolobrzeg on Poland's Baltic coast did not disappoint. We had been driving for what felt like fourteen hours from Gdansk airport, though the hire car's clock insisted it was merely three. My partner was navigating using a printed map because I had proudly declared we would not need data roaming, a decision I was already regretting when we hit our first wrong turn somewhere near Koszalin.

The proper mishap came when we finally reached Kolobrzeg itself. I spotted what I thought was our holiday complex, swung into the car park with theatrical confidence, and proceeded to unload half our luggage before a very polite security guard wandered over to explain we were at a private residential block three streets away from where we were actually staying. There is nothing quite like repacking a suitcase of hastily scattered flip-flops while maintaining one's dignity in front of a man whose entire job appears to be preventing exactly this sort of confusion.

Our actual accommodation, when we found it, turned out to be a modern apartment complex tucked slightly back from the main seafront promenade. I had worried this might feel too far from the action, but that worry evaporated the following morning when we decided to ignore the obvious route to the beach and instead wandered down an unmarked path we spotted behind a supermarket.

This is where the holiday truly began. The path led through a patch of scrubby woodland I never would have entered had I been thinking sensibly, and deposited us at a tiny cove the tourist maps apparently forgot to include. A handful of local pensioners were fishing from the rocks with that particular patience only Polish grandfathers seem to possess. One of them, a chap called Tadeusz though I suspect I mangled the pronunciation, gestured for us to try his spot. Within twenty minutes I had tangled my line so comprehensively that he took it as a personal project, spending the better part of an hour undoing my mess while communicating entirely through expressive shrugs and the occasional sympathetic chuckle.

Getting properly lost became our daily ritual. We found a bakery operating from what appeared to be someone's converted garage, selling pierogi so fresh they burned our fingertips. We stumbled upon a miniature railway museum housed in a garden shed, run by a man who had spent forty years building working steam models and clearly preferred their company to human conversation. We discovered that if you walk far enough east along the coastal path, past where the proper beaches end, you reach a stretch of marshland where storks nest in abandoned telegraph poles and the only sound is the wind flattening the reeds.

My favourite accidental discovery came on our fourth day. We had set out for the town's famous lighthouse, took a wrong turning through a housing estate that all looked identical in the grey morning light, and ended up at a small harbour used by working fishing boats rather than pleasure craft. An old woman was selling smoked fish from a folding table, nothing more than a handwritten price list and an umbrella for shelter. We bought mackerel still warm from the smoker, found a bench overlooking the water, and ate it with our fingers like absolute animals while a heron watched us with what I can only describe as professional disdain.

That moment stuck with me. I have been on holidays where every hour was scheduled, every restaurant researched and booked, every sight ticked off with photographic efficiency. This was not that holiday. This was a week of wrong turns and happy accidents, of accepting that I am fundamentally incompetent at navigation and that this incompetence might actually be a gift.

We never did make it to the lighthouse. I am sure it is very nice.