I suppose every decent holiday story ought to begin with a mild disaster, and mine certainly obliged. We'd been driving from Karlshamn through the winding lanes of Blekinge, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who'd glanced at a map roughly forty minutes prior, when I became absolutely convinced that our sat nav had developed a personal vendetta. The voice kept insisting we turn onto what appeared to be a gravel track leading directly into someone's private forest, and after three increasingly tense circuits of what I now suspect was the same identical-looking copse, I declared we were officially lost. This was the funny bit, or so I kept telling myself: two grown adults, one of whom had supposedly researched this trip, crawling along at fifteen miles per hour while Swedish holiday homes peered at us through the trees like judgmental wooden faces.

The mishap, naturally, involved our groceries. In my flustered state of repeated three-point turns, I'd left the boot slightly ajar, and a bag of provisions had executed a slow-motion escape onto the gravel. We discovered this twenty minutes later upon arrival, by which point our eggs had achieved a state of artistic splatter that Jackson Pollock might have admired. Nothing says "welcome to your holiday" quite like scraping yolk off a hire car bumper while mosquitoes conduct reconnaissance missions around your ears.

But here's the curious thing about being properly lost in Blekinge: you start noticing what you'd otherwise speed past. That first wrong turn deposited us beside a tiny inlet I'd never have found deliberately, where an elderly gentleman sat motionless in a rowing boat, apparently communing with fish on terms of mutual respect. We watched him for longer than was probably decent, partly because we couldn't work out how to reverse without drawing attention to ourselves, and partly because there was something hypnotic about the stillness. The water there wasn't the dramatic stuff of postcards; it was merely calm, ordinary, and completely absorbing.

Our actual accommodation, when we finally located it, sat among trees with that particular Scandinavian talent for being simultaneously orderly and wild. The red wooden exterior had softened to the colour of old bricks, and a path led down toward Hasslo's shoreline with the unhurried confidence of somewhere that knows exactly what it is. I spent the first evening convinced I'd spotted a better route to the water, a shortcut that would save us whole minutes of walking. This became something of an obsession over subsequent days. I'd set off after breakfast with the purposeful stride of a polar explorer, only to find myself emerging from birch thickets at spots that looked tantalisingly familiar yet proved to be entirely new discoveries.

One such accidental wander brought me to a rocky outcrop where someone, years ago, had arranged flat stones into rough seating. No sign explained it, no path officially led there, and the view across the archipelago fragments felt almost embarrassingly private. I sat feeling slightly fraudulent, as if I'd stumbled into someone else's secret without permission, then decided that perhaps secrets shared by accident count differently.

My partner, less temperamentally inclined toward compulsive path-finding, developed her own habit of wrong turns on the coastal lanes nearby. She'd return with reports of abandoned boathouses, of a small beach where driftwood had accumulated into sculptural piles, of a woman selling strawberries from a garden table with no prices listed and absolute trust in visitors' honesty. None of these appeared in anything we'd read; they simply existed, waiting for the sufficiently confused traveller.

By week's end, I'd abandoned any pretence of efficient navigation. The eggs had been replaced, the sat nav silenced, and my morning walks had become deliberate exercises in not knowing where I was going. I never did find my original shortcut to the shore. Instead, I found half a dozen other ways, each slightly different, each revealing some small detail I'd have missed by taking the direct route: a particular moss on a particular stone, the way light fell through pines at a particular hour, the sound of water against rock that sounded, from certain angles, almost like breathing.

We left with the boot properly secured and a folded map we'd barely unfolded. Some holidays, I've realised, reward the lost more generously than the found.