I had been driving for the better part of six hours when I realised my sat nav had developed what I can only describe as a rebellious streak. One moment I was following the A4 towards the Polish border, the next I was bumping down a forestry track that grew narrower with every metre, my little hire car making noises that suggested it had never signed up for this sort of treatment. The mishap, if you can call a complete navigational breakdown that, came when I tried to correct course by following what looked like a proper road on my phone screen. It was not a proper road. It was a logging path. And I, in my infinite wisdom, drove straight into a puddle that turned out to be considerably deeper than it appeared.

There is something uniquely humbling about standing ankle-deep in murky water, pushing your own car while wondering if your travel insurance covers "idiocy." A passing tractor driver found the whole scene tremendously entertaining, which I suppose made two of us, once the initial panic subsided. He towed me out with the patient air of someone who had performed this service many times before, and pointed me back toward actual tarmac with a gesture that managed to be both helpful and faintly pitying.

By the time I reached Kolonia Lesna, I was several hours late, covered in mud, and had developed what I can only describe as a profound respect for Polish forestry. The property itself sits in what the locals call the Sudeten foothills, a landscape of rolling woodland and sudden valleys that feels wonderfully removed from anywhere you might have meant to be. My host, a practical woman named Magda, took one look at my state and produced both a towel and a beer without my asking for either. I liked her immediately.

The cottage was simple in the best way - wooden beams, a stove that demanded a certain amount of negotiation, and windows that framed nothing but trees. I had planned a structured few days of hiking and sightseeing. Instead, I spent my first morning simply wandering without purpose, having lost all faith in digital navigation and most of my faith in my own sense of direction.

This is how I found the chapel. It was perhaps half a mile from the cottage, down a path that started as a proper trail and degenerated into something I only continued along because turning back seemed equally uncertain. The building was tiny, clearly centuries old, with a rusted gate and an interior that smelled of damp stone and old wax. No signposts pointed to it. No guidebook mentioned it. I sat on the single wooden pew for twenty minutes, listening to nothing but birdsong and the occasional creak of the roof, and felt something shift in my chest that I had not expected. I am not a religious man, but I am increasingly fond of accidental peace.

The getting lost became a habit after that. I abandoned maps entirely, which in hindsight was perhaps an overcorrection, but it led me to places I would never have found otherwise. A clearing where an elderly man kept beehives and insisted I try his honey straight from the comb, speaking no English and me speaking barely any Polish, yet somehow conducting a perfectly satisfactory conversation through gestures and appreciative noises. A stream where the water ran so clear you could count the stones on the bottom, and where I spent an afternoon doing precisely nothing, which felt like the most productive thing I had done in months.

There was a village, if you could call three houses and a shed a village, where someone had nailed an old bicycle to a tree as a sort of informal landmark. I passed it three times from different directions before I accepted that I was walking in circles, and rather than frustration, I felt something closer to amusement at my own stubbornness. A woman emerged from one of the houses, observed my predicament, and walked me back to a path I recognised. She asked for nothing, seemed faintly confused by my thanks, and returned to her garden as if rescuing lost Englishmen was a routine interruption to her morning.

What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that the Sudeten foothills taught me something I had forgotten I needed to learn. There is a particular joy in not knowing where you are going, in trusting that the wrong turn might be the right one, in accepting that your plans were never as important as you believed. I arrived at Kolonia Lesna with a schedule and a sense of purpose. I left with muddy boots, a jar of honey, and the growing suspicion that I had been doing holidays wrong for most of my adult life. The car made it back to the rental place with only a faint smell of bog about it, which I chose not to mention, and I drove away already planning when I might return, ideally with a worse sat nav and no itinerary whatsoever.