I should have trusted my gut when the sat-nav started insisting we take a left into what looked like someone's beetroot field. But no, I am a modern man, beholden to technology, and so there I was in Pomerania, Poland, wedged between two hedgerows in a hire car that suddenly felt three sizes too big, wondering if the nice man at Gdansk airport had secretly laughed when I'd asked for the "compact" upgrade.

The mishap, then. We'd been driving from Gdansk for the best part of two hours, through pine forests and past lakes that glimmered like spilled mercury, and I was feeling rather pleased with myself. Polish motorways, conquered. Rural roads, navigated with aplomb. And then, somewhere between Kartuzy and what I now know is properly called Sikorzyno, I spotted a sign for a lake. Not on any map I'd studied. Not in any guidebook. Just a hand-painted board, slightly askew, promising wodowskazy or some such. I turned off, following what I can only describe as a goat track with aspirations, and within four minutes had found myself in that beetroot field debacle, the sat-nav making increasingly desperate recalculating noises while my partner, sat beside me, adopted the particular silence of someone who has been married long enough to know that commentary would not be welcome.

We abandoned the car where it stood, walked back to the main road, and flagged down a chap on a bicycle who looked approximately ninety and spoke not a word of English. Through a combination of pointing, map-waving, and what I can only assume was atrocious pronunciation of "Sikorzyno," he led us, via a series of gestures that suggested we follow him, down a lane I would never have noticed. It ran between two stands of birch, then opened suddenly onto a clearing where a small lake lay, utterly still, with a single wooden pier and a fisherman who raised his hand in greeting without surprise, as if strangers appeared from nowhere every Tuesday.

I felt, in that moment, the particular foolishness of the over-planner. I'd researched Kashubian folk museums. I'd noted opening times for the nearest Kartuzy church. I'd even, heaven help me, read about regional pottery styles. And here was this nameless water, this pier, this fisherman, this accidental discovery that no algorithm would ever surface because no algorithm had ever thought to look.

We found our holiday home eventually, of course. The chap on the bicycle, whose name turned out to be Wladyslaw, delivered us to a lane we would have driven past three times without seeing it, and there was the wooden house, half-hidden by lilac bushes that had gone slightly wild, with a veranda that creaked in the most satisfying way when you stepped onto it. The key was in a box with a code. The instructions were in English that had clearly passed through several languages to get there. We deciphered enough to make tea, to work the shower, to establish that the wood-burning stove was decorative rather than functional, which was just as well given my track record with open flames.

But that first evening, we walked back to Wladyslaw's lake. Took us twenty minutes through fields that smelled of warm earth and something I couldn't identify, some Pomeranian herb or other. The fisherman had gone. The light was doing that long northern stretch where nine o'clock still feels like late afternoon. We sat on the pier, feet dangling, and watched a heron work the far shore with the patience of something that has never once checked a schedule.

I keep thinking about that wrong turn. How the best bit of the whole trip came from a moment of pure incompetence, from trusting a sign that no tourist board had approved, from following a nonagenarian cyclist into territory that Google would classify as "here be dragons." The rest of the week brought its own discoveries, equally unplanned, equally unlisted. A bakery in a village whose name I never learned, where the woman spoke only Kashubian and sold us pierogi through a system of nods and held-up fingers. A path through marshland that started behind a bus stop and ended at a viewpoint over four lakes, none of them named on our map. A church interior, stumbled upon during an open door, with folk paintings on the ceiling that made me laugh out loud at their cheerful irreverence.

But it was that first evening that set the tone. The realisation that getting properly lost, the kind of lost where you must rely on the kindness of strangers and your own questionable instincts, is not a failure of navigation but a different kind of journey entirely. I am not, by nature, a person who wanders without purpose. I like a plan. I like a backup plan. I like knowing where the nearest petrol station is and whether it accepts contactless.

Yet there on that pier, with my shoes off and my feet in water that was colder than anticipated, I understood something about why people do this deliberately. The hidden gem is hidden for a reason. You cannot arrive there with intention. You must bumble, you must misread, you must occasionally find yourself in a beetroot field with a sat-nav having what can only be described as an existential crisis.

We stayed a week. The house was comfortable in that particular way of wooden places, where every floorboard has personality and the windows don't quite seal against the morning chill. We made fires in the outdoor pit, badly. We bought fish from a man who sold them from his garage, the price negotiated through a combination of gestures and my partner's surprisingly competent Polish, learned from a grandmother she'd never thought to mention. We walked lanes that became paths that became something you could only call a suggestion of direction, and we found things at the end of them: a ruined manor house, its gardens run to meadow; a stand of ancient oak, signposted only by a bench with no view; a pond where frogs made such a chorus that conversation became impossible, and so we simply sat, listening to amphibian opinion.

I came home with mud on boots I had not planned to muddy, with photographs of places I cannot precisely locate, with a small stone from Wladyslaw's lake that sits now on my desk and serves as paperweight and reminder. The reminder being, I suppose, that competence is overrated, that the best stories begin with a wrong turn, and that there are still places in Europe where a man on a bicycle can lead you to something no search engine knows.

We never saw Wladyslaw again to thank him properly. I like to think he understood.