I had convinced myself that driving through Pomerania would be a doddle. Three hours from Szczecin, straight up the coast, maybe a quick stop for pierogi. What I had not factored in was my own spectacular talent for missing turnings, which led to me doing three laps of the same village roundabout while my phone insistently tried to send me down a road that appeared to be someone's driveway. By the time I finally spotted the sign for Nowe Warpno, I was half an hour late, thoroughly flustered, and in desperate need of something stronger than the lukewarm water bottle rolling around my passenger footwell.

The property sat tucked along a quiet lane, the sort of place you would absolutely sail past if you were not already in a state of hypervigilance from your earlier navigational failures. I had booked what the listing described as a traditional Pomeranian house, and stepping out of the car, I was immediately struck by how utterly still everything was. No traffic hum, no distant motorway drone, just the faint rustle of trees and what I later learned was the Szczecin Lagoon somewhere beyond the greenery. I stood there like a proper lemon, keys in hand, suddenly aware that I had not spoken to another human since the petrol station outside Goleniow.

The mishap came when I attempted what I thought was the front door. It was not. It was, in fact, a very solidly built garden shed with ambitions above its station. I had managed to wedge my key into the lock and was giving it a proper wrestle when the actual owner appeared around the side of the house, watching me with the patient expression of someone who had clearly seen this before. "First time in Warpno?" she asked, not unkindly. I admitted it was, and that my sense of direction had apparently been left behind in England along with my ability to read basic property descriptions. She laughed, showed me the correct entrance, and left me with a map she had drawn herself, covered in tiny X marks and annotations like "good mushrooms here in September" and "do not trust the big road, it lies."

That hand-drawn map became the entire foundation of my holiday. The next morning, still smarting from my shed encounter, I set out with deliberate intent to get properly lost. I ignored the main route toward the town centre and instead followed a narrow track that seemed to lead nowhere in particular. It dipped through birch woodland, emerged alongside a reed-fringed pond where a heron regarded me with profound disinterest, and eventually deposited me at a tiny clearing with a weathered wooden bench facing the water. No sign, no information board, no other person for miles. I sat there for an hour, watching dragonflies stitch across the surface, and felt something in my chest unclench that I had not realised was tight.

The following days brought more of these accidental discoveries. A path that started behind the local shop and wound through allotments where elderly gardeners offered me tomatoes and incomprehensible advice. A stretch of lagoon shore accessible only by squeezing between two fences, where the mud flats hosted flocks of waders I could not identify but happily watched anyway. A clearing in the pine forest where someone had long ago abandoned a rusted bicycle, now slowly being claimed by moss and ferns, creating the most unintentionally beautiful sculpture I have seen anywhere.

Each find came from wrong turns, from ignoring the sensible route, from that particular combination of mild stubbornness and poor preparation that seems to define my travelling style. I began to understand why the owner had drawn her map the way she had, why the X marks clustered in places with no official names. The region does not announce itself loudly. Pomerania rewards the wandering, the slightly confused, the people who end up places by accident rather than design.

On my final evening, I found myself on that same wooden bench by the hidden pond, having taken three separate wrong paths to get there. The heron had been replaced by a pair of grebes, and the light was doing that particular golden thing that makes even ordinary landscapes look borrowed from a painting. I thought about my shed-lock wrestling, my roundabout confusion, my complete inability to follow straightforward instructions. For once, my incompetence had genuinely paid off. I would never have found this spot deliberately. I would never have slowed down enough to notice it.

Nowe Warpno does not grab you by the collar and demand attention. It waits, slightly off to the side, for you to bumble into it with your wrong keys and your misread maps. I cannot promise you will find the same bench, the same pond, the same rusted bicycle becoming art. But I can promise that if you give yourself permission to get lost, something worth finding will likely appear. It usually does, in my limited but enthusiastic experience, right after you have accepted that you have absolutely no idea where you are going.