I have always believed that the best holidays begin with something going slightly wrong, and our trip to Olsztyn Sapunki proved me absolutely right. We had been driving through Masuria for the better part of three hours, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who had briefly glanced at a map two days prior, when we took what I can only describe as an optimistic left turn onto a track that grew narrower, bumpier, and increasingly committed to the idea that we were not welcome. The sat nav had given up some miles back, adopting that sullen silence that technology reserves for its most devastating judgments. We pressed on, because turning around felt like an admission of defeat, and because the trees had closed in so completely that reversing seemed genuinely impossible.

The mishap, when it came, was almost laughably predictable. A low branch, a roof box we had forgotten we were carrying, and a sound like a giant cracking a walnut. We stopped, we stared, we conducted a solemn inspection that revealed our luggage was now enjoying considerably more ventilation than before. My partner looked at me. I looked at my partner. We both laughed, that slightly hysterical laughter that follows minor disasters on holiday, and decided that whatever was in the roof box could probably survive a bit of Polish rainwater.

It was in this state of mild chaos that we finally found Olsztyn Sapunki, or rather, that it found us. The property sits in a quiet corner near the village of Purda, surrounded by woodland and the kind of stillness that makes you realise how much noise you normally carry around in your head. Our first impression was not of grandeur but of relief, the particular relief of arriving somewhere that immediately feels like it understands you. The wooden exterior had weathered to a soft silver, and smoke was curling from the chimney in a way that suggested someone had anticipated our bedraggled arrival.

What struck me most, once we had stopped marvelling at our own survival, was how completely the place belongs to its surroundings. This is not a holiday home that has been parachuted into the landscape; it has settled there, grown into it. The garden gives directly onto forest, and within minutes of dumping our bags we were wandering down a path that seemed to have been waiting for exactly this purpose. We found a small clearing where someone, years ago, had placed a rough wooden bench facing a pond so still it looked like a photograph of itself. There was no sign, no indication that this was meant for visitors. It simply existed, a secret shared between whoever had built it and whoever happened to stumble upon it.

That first evening, we walked further than intended, as one always does when the light is fading and every turn seems worth investigating. We came upon a tiny chapel, locked but lovely, its wooden tower leaning slightly as if tired from centuries of standing. No guidebook had mentioned it. No website had suggested we seek it out. It was simply there, waiting for the lost and the curious.

I found myself thinking, as we eventually retraced our steps by torchlight, that this is what I had forgotten about travel. The planned moments are fine, necessary even. But the unplanned ones, the ones that find you when you are at your most dishevelled and receptive, those are the ones that stay. Our broken roof box, our ridiculous detour, our stubborn refusal to admit we were lost, these had delivered us to something we could not have found on purpose.

By the time we returned to Sapunki, the stars had emerged in that particular abundance that rural Poland seems to reserve for those who have earned them through minor suffering. We sat on the terrace with a bottle of local beer, still slightly damp, still slightly ridiculous, and entirely content. The mishap had become the story. The getting lost had become the finding. And Masuria, I realised, rewards the wanderer more generously than the planner. We had five more days ahead of us, and I made a silent promise to get lost at least once more, to let the place show us what it wanted us to see rather than demanding what we thought we had come to find.