The thing about Sat Navs is they have absolutely no sense of humour. Ours certainly didn't when it sent us down what I can only describe as a glorified tractor path somewhere between Olsztyn and our final destination. "Turn left," it chirped, as if instructing us into a lake. We did not turn left. We turned around, swore a bit, and promptly got even more lost.

This is how we found the stork.

Not a real one, mind you, though Masuria apparently has thousands of the things nesting on every other telegraph pole. No, this was a wooden carving, about six feet tall, standing guard outside a farm shop that appeared to have been built from whatever materials happened to be lying about in 1973 and never updated. We stopped because my partner needed the loo. I stopped because I needed to stretch my legs before they seized up entirely. What we discovered was a woman selling jars of mushrooms she'd picked herself from the forest out back, and a smoked cheese so good I bought three rounds and immediately ate one in the car like an animal.

The Rus Mala itself, when we finally reached it, turned out to be one of those places that makes getting lost feel like a conspiracy of good fortune. It's a proper old Masurian farmhouse, the sort with timber framing that makes you feel slightly inadequate about your own DIY efforts. The owners had left us a note and a bottle of something clear and potent that I initially mistook for water. I did not make that mistake twice.

Our first morning, we ignored every sensible suggestion in the welcome pack and set off with no particular plan beyond "see what happens." What happened was a wrong turning that deposited us at a jetty where an elderly man was repairing a fishing boat and seemed entirely unbothered by our presence. He spoke no English. We spoke no Polish beyond "dziekuje" and "piwo," which felt insufficient. Through gestures and what I can only call interpretive dance, we established that his name was Bogdan, that he'd lived there since 1962, and that we could hire his spare canoe for roughly the cost of a London sandwich.

We paddled until the houses disappeared. The lakes up here connect like a watery jigsaw, and without Bogdan's rough map sketched on the back of a cigarette packet, we'd have had no idea which direction constituted "civilisation." This was, of course, the entire point. We found a beach that existed on no map we could find, just a curve of sand and a family of swans who viewed us with the disdain swans bring to all human endeavours. We ate the remaining cheese. We drank warm water. It was absolutely perfect in its simplicity.

The getting lost became a habit. A missed signpost led us to a bakery in a village whose name I still cannot pronounce, where the bread came out of a wood-fired oven at precisely six each morning and was sold out by half past. A wrong turn on a cycle path deposited us at a clearing where someone had built an entire outdoor sauna from driftwood, apparently for public use, with a handwritten note suggesting donations. We donated generously. We sweated gratefully.

I think what struck me most was how unbothered everyone seemed by our aimlessness. In Britain, wandering about without purpose feels faintly suspicious, like you're casing the joint. In Masuria, people seemed to expect it. They'd wave from gardens, offer directions unprompted, occasionally produce food from nowhere and insist you try it. There was no performance to it, no tourist-facing polish. Just a quiet acceptance that you'd ended up there, however accidentally, and might as well be fed while you figured out where "there" actually was.

By our final day, we'd stopped trying to plan altogether. We drove until something looked interesting, then stopped. We found a church with a leaning tower that the local priest cheerfully admitted was "probably going to fall down eventually, but not today." We found a lake so still it reflected the clouds like a mirror, and sat there for two hours doing absolutely nothing productive. We found ourselves, I suppose, though saying so feels unbearably naff.

The Sat Nav, when we finally switched it back on for the journey home, suggested the same ridiculous route. We ignored it, naturally, and found three more wrong turnings that felt absolutely right.