I should have known the holiday was going to be character-building when I confidently marched up to what I thought was our cottage, rucksack bouncing, and tried the key. Nothing. Tried again. Still nothing. Then a very Swedish-looking bloke appeared at the window with a cup of coffee and a look of polite confusion. Wrong house. Wrong island, technically. I'd got off the ferry one stop early and was now standing on someone else's decking like a lost Labrador. The actual cottage was another ten-minute chug across the water, which I spent trying to look dignified while clutching a bag of slightly squashed cinnamon buns.

The proper place turned out to be worth every mortifying second. Ronneby archipelago has that particular Scandinavian trick of looking almost too perfect, like someone's gone overboard with the Photoshop. Red wooden cottages, granite boulders worn smooth by glaciers, water so clear you can watch fish having what looks like an existential crisis. Our cottage sat on its own little nub of rock, connected to the main island by a rough track that I immediately decided to explore without a map. This was, in retrospect, a theme of the week.

The first morning I wandered off intending to find the shop. Forty minutes later I was standing in a clearing surrounded by blueberry bushes and what I later learned was an old charcoal-burning site. No shop. No path I recognised. Just absolute silence and a woodpecker doing its best jackhammer impression. I sat on a stump and ate my emergency packet of crisps, feeling simultaneously foolish and rather pleased with myself. There's something about being properly lost that strips away the nonsense. No phone signal, no Google Maps, no plan. Just you and whatever's around the next bend of pine trees.

That stumble led me to the best discovery of the whole trip. Following what I thought might be a trail but was probably just a deer track, I came down to a tiny cove I'd never have found otherwise. Flat rocks perfect for spreading a towel, water that made me actually swim despite being a committed coward about cold water, and not another soul. I went back every day. Never saw anyone else there. It felt stolen, somehow, like I'd cheated the system.

The archipelago rewards this kind of accidental wandering. I found a shed selling smoked fish from someone's garden, open apparently whenever the owner felt like it. I found a swimming spot where the rocks had been worn into natural steps by generations of feet. I found a clearing where someone had left a bench facing the sunset, presumably for their own private contemplation, now slightly mossy and completely wonderful. Each discovery came from taking the wrong turning, the longer route, the path that looked less promising.

By day four I'd stopped trying to get anywhere specific. The shop could wait. The planned kayak trip never happened because I kept finding better things while walking to the hire place. There's a particular freedom in surrendering to this, in accepting that your holiday will not look like the brochure because the brochure doesn't know about the deer track that leads to the smoked fish shed.

On the last evening I sat on my stolen rock with a tin of something from the surprisingly excellent local supermarket and watched the light do that prolonged Scandinavian fade that lasts for hours. I'd arrived thinking I needed activities, destinations, achievements to recount later. I left with a sunburn, a bag of slightly questionable smoked fish, and the certain knowledge that some places only give themselves up when you're not looking for them.