I should have known the Sat Nav was plotting against me when it tried to send us through what looked like someone's vegetable patch just outside Gizycko. Three hours of driving from Warsaw, my partner Dave was navigating, and I was doing that thing where you grip the seat and make helpful comments like "are you sure this is a road?" It wasn't. It was a cart track. And our little hire car very nearly became a permanent feature of a Masurian cabbage field.

We were trying to find Marozek, this wooden holiday house we'd booked through NOVASOL, somewhere in the labyrinth of lakes and forests that makes up Poland's lake district. The directions mentioned something about "turning at the big oak tree," which in Masuria describes roughly every third tree. We got magnificently, gloriously lost.

Dave insisted we keep going. I insisted we stop and ask someone. The someone turned out to be an elderly chap walking a dog that resembled a furry loaf of bread. He spoke no English. We spoke no Polish. Through a performance worthy of an amateur dramatics society, involving pointing, map-waving, and me accidentally miming something that made him laugh so hard he had to lean on a fence post, we established we'd gone three kilometres past the turning. He walked us back to it, still chuckling.

The proper road to Marozek turned out to be a sandy track through pine woods, opening suddenly onto a clearing where the house sat, all honey-coloured timber and a veranda that looked out over a small private lake. I say private lake. The property details called it a "fishing pond." Having seen it, I'm upgrading it. There was a rowing boat tied to a little jetty, reeds waving about, and the kind of silence that makes you realise how noisy your life normally is.

The mishap with the cabbage field had cost us an hour, so we arrived as the light was going that strange Masurian gold colour, everything looking slightly unreal. The key was in a lockbox, which Dave couldn't open because his hands were still shaking from the cart track experience. I managed it on the third attempt, feeling disproportionately competent.

Inside, Marozek smelled of pine and something else, something clean and slightly sweet. The living area had one of those massive stone fireplaces that dominates everything, and furniture that looked like it had been made from the same forest we'd just driven through. Upstairs, a mezzanine bedroom with windows you could actually open wide, no health-and-safety nonsense, just fresh air and the sound of something splashing in the pond below.

We'd brought food from Warsaw, planning to cook, but instead we sat on that veranda with bread and cheese and a bottle of Zywiec, watching the light disappear completely. Dave kept saying "can you believe we nearly didn't find this?" and I kept not answering because I was listening to a nightingale, or what I decided was a nightingale, having no actual idea what a nightingale sounds like.

The getting lost had been frustrating. Standing there, with the darkness coming on and the trees making their evening noises, it felt like something else entirely. Like the place had required a small test before it let you in. We'd failed the first attempt, obviously. Crashed about in a cabbage field like incompetent burglars. But the second go, with the laughing man and his bread-dog, that felt like being properly admitted.

I woke early the next morning, still on Warsaw time, and took the rowing boat out without waking Dave. The mist was doing that thing where it sits just above the water, and everything feels borrowed from a fairy tale. I found a corner of the pond where the reeds grew thick, and something large moved beneath me, probably a pike, possibly a small submarine. I didn't investigate. Some things you leave alone.

That accidental discovery, the hidden corner of an already hidden place, became the pattern of the week. We took wrong turns deliberately after that, found a village shop where the woman sold us smoked fish she'd caught herself, found a track that led to a clearing where someone had left a rusted tractor from approximately 1953 as if it were an art installation. We found things by not finding the things we were looking for.

Marozek itself kept revealing itself in increments. The outdoor shower that actually had hot water if you were patient. The hammock strung between trees that I'd missed entirely on first arrival. The way the morning light hit the kitchen at exactly the right angle for proper coffee contemplation.

We never did work out what I'd mimed to make the old man laugh so hard. Dave kept trying to get me to recreate it. I refused. Some mysteries you preserve, particularly the ones at your own expense.