I have always believed that the best holidays begin with something going slightly wrong, and our trip to Brakne Hoby was no exception. My partner and I had been driving through Blekinge for the better part of three hours, congratulating ourselves on how smoothly everything had gone, when I realised with a sinking feeling that I had been confidently navigating us towards the wrong postcode for the last forty minutes. The satnav had given up in disgust somewhere near Karlshamn, and I had taken it upon myself to direct us using what I can only describe as masculine intuition. This, as any reasonable person knows, is just arrogance with a beard.

We found ourselves on a narrow gravel track somewhere west of Brakne Hoby proper, surrounded by dense pine forest and absolutely no mobile signal. My partner gave me that particular look she has perfected over fifteen years, the one that manages to convey disappointment without wasting any words. I was preparing my defence when she spotted a small wooden sign half-hidden behind some brambles, pointing towards what appeared to be a lake. We had nothing to lose, so we abandoned dignity and followed it.

The track opened suddenly onto a tiny clearing with a wooden jetty and a boathouse that looked as though it had been there since before Sweden had a name. The lake was perfectly still, ringed with birch and oak, and not a single building visible across its entire surface. We sat on that jetty for twenty minutes without speaking, sharing a packet of crisps that had somehow survived the journey, and I felt something shift in my chest. This was not the holiday we had planned. It was already better.

We eventually found the proper road to our cottage, of course, and the property itself was everything the listing had promised. A traditional red wooden house with white trim, nestled among mature trees with a proper wood-fired sauna and a small deck overlooking its own patch of forest. But I kept thinking about that accidental lake, and the strange gift of being lost.

The next morning, armed with coffee and a determination to repeat our mistake, we set off without the satnav entirely. We took the first turning that looked unpromising, then the second, then found ourselves on a farm track that ended at a small orchard where an elderly woman was harvesting apples. She spoke no English, we spoke barely any Swedish, but through gestures and laughter she pressed bags of early Discovery apples into our hands and pointed us towards a path through her land.

That path led to a rocky outcrop with views across rolling forest that I still cannot properly describe. The Blekinge landscape is not dramatic in the way of mountains or fjords. It is subtler, more intimate, a constant negotiation between woodland and water, granite and birch. We spent hours simply sitting there, watching a hawk circle above the treeline, and I found myself reflecting on how much of my life I spend rushing towards destinations that matter far less than I pretend.

Over the following days, this became our rhythm. Deliberate wandering, accidental discoveries. A tiny beach on the Braknean river where we swam in water so cold it stole our breath. A village bakery in what I later learned was Trensum, where the owner had been making the same cardamom buns for thirty years and seemed faintly surprised anyone had found him. A forest clearing where someone had long ago abandoned a rusted tractor, now colonised by moss and wild strawberries.

The genuine Brakne Hoby, when we finally strolled through it properly, turned out to be a charming village with a lovely church and a sense of peaceful purpose. But by then we had fallen in love with the territory of the lost, the unmarked, the accidentally encountered. Our final evening, we returned to that first lake by following my increasingly unreliable memory, and sat again on that jetty as the light faded. My partner leaned against me and observed that getting lost had been the best decision I had ever made with my masculine intuition. I could not argue. Some mistakes, it seems, are worth making on purpose.