I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through what looked like someone's beetroot field. Three hours out of Gdansk, somewhere between Kartuzy and the middle of nowhere, my partner and I found ourselves on a track so narrow that brambles were doing a slow dance down both sides of the hire car. The mishap? I'd confidently punched "Przewoz" into Google Maps, not realising there are roughly seventeen places with that name in Poland. Ours, it turned out, was not the one the Sat Nav had selected with what I can only describe as malicious glee.

We had been aiming for a little wooden house near Lake Klasztorne, booked through Novasol, where the photos promised a proper Kashubian escape. What we got first was an accidental tour of rural Pomorskie that involved reversing past a very judgmental goat and a moment where I genuinely considered knocking on a stranger's door to ask if we were still in the right country. My partner, who had been in charge of snacks but not navigation, found this hilarious until she realised we had eaten all the good crisps during the first wrong turn.

When we finally stumbled upon the actual Przewoz, it was not because of technology. It was because I spotted a hand-painted sign for honey by the road, slammed the brakes, and asked the beekeeper for directions. He spoke Kashubian first, Polish second, and somehow we understood enough to learn we were ten minutes away by tractor, which in car terms meant about four minutes if you did not mind a bit of mud. We minded a bit of mud. We arrived anyway.

The house itself sat back from a lane that I am fairly certain does not appear on any official map. A wooden gate, slightly wonky, led to a garden where someone had planted what I later learned were Kashubian strawberries, the tiny wild sort that taste like summer concentrated into a single bite. The key was in a lockbox with a code that had seemed overly complicated when emailed but made perfect sense when you saw the place. It was exactly the sort of property that trusts you not to be a criminal, which I found rather moving and my partner found naive, though she changed her mind later.

Our first evening, still slightly giddy from the journey, we decided to walk to the lake without consulting any map. This was how we found the abandoned pier, half-sunk and completely wonderful, where someone had left a folding chair facing the water as if they had simply stepped away in 1987 and never returned. We sat there until the mosquitoes politely suggested we move on. Heading back, we took what I insisted was a shortcut and discovered a shrine in a clearing, the kind with fresh flowers and a painted Madonna that locals clearly still tended. We had not heard it, had not read about it, would never have found it on purpose.

That became the pattern of the week. The bakery in Suleczyno where we stopped for bread on a whim turned out to use a wood-fired oven from before the war. The swimming spot we found by following a grandmother carrying a towel turned out to be where the local kids had jumped from rocks for generations. The mushroom-drying shed we peered into, thinking it abandoned, led to an hour with a man named Jozef who explained the difference between true Kashubian fungi and the inferior sort they apparently sell to tourists in Gdansk.

I kept thinking about that first wrong turn, the goat, the crisps. I am not someone who normally gets lost on purpose. I plan, I research, I read reviews until the joy calcifies entirely. But there was something about this particular corner of Poland, about the way the lanes loop and the signs assume you already know where you are going, that forced a different rhythm. By day three I had stopped checking my phone. By day five I was actively seeking out tracks that looked unpromising.

The last morning, we tried to find the beekeeper again to buy honey, partly as thanks and partly because it had been extraordinary. We got lost, of course. Found instead a small cemetery with wrought-iron crosses and names in both Polish and Kashubian, the kind of place that makes you stand still without quite knowing why. We never did find the beekeeper. We left with honey from a different farm, bought from an honesty box, and a strong suspicion that this was exactly how it was meant to work.