I have never been particularly good at following instructions, which is probably why I ended up driving past the turning for our cottage three times before finally admitting defeat and ringing the owner. "Sandviken?" she said, in that warm Swedish accent that makes everything sound faintly amused. "You are nearly in Denmark, my friend."

This was not, strictly speaking, true. But it felt true. My partner and I had flown to Copenhagen, picked up a hire car, and crossed the Oresund Bridge with the sort of misplaced confidence that comes from having watched one too many Scandinavian crime dramas. Blekinge looked straightforward on the map. It is not straightforward in reality, particularly when your sat-nav decides to have an existential crisis somewhere outside Karlshamn and starts directing you towards what appeared to be a field of very judgmental cows.

The mishap, when it came, was spectacularly mundane. We finally found the lane down to Sandviken, bouncing along with our suitcases sliding about in the back, congratulating ourselves on our persistence. Then I caught sight of something in the rear-view mirror. Our wheelie case, the large one with all my proper shoes, was making a determined bid for freedom down the gravel track. I stopped. It did not stop. It carried on rolling with a kind of dignified inevitability until it fetched up against a wooden fence post, popped open, and distributed my underwear across a stranger's front garden.

I have never moved so fast in my life. My partner, I should note, was no help whatsoever. She was too busy filming the whole thing on her phone, wheezing with laughter, while I scrambled about in the long grass trying to retrieve items before the owners came home or, worse, before a local dog took an interest. We stuffed everything back in, snapped the broken catch with a hairband, and crept the final hundred metres to the cottage like criminals.

The cottage itself, when we finally stood before it, rather took my breath away. Not grand, you understand. Nothing so pretentious. A traditional wooden house in that lovely faded red, with white trim and a small porch that looked out over the archipelago. The owner had left the key in a little wooden box with a combination lock, and inside smelled of pine and something faintly vanilla, perhaps from the cleaning products or perhaps just from being properly looked after. There was a wood-burning stove, a kitchen that managed to be both compact and genuinely useful, and windows that framed the water in a way that made me immediately want to sit down and do absolutely nothing.

But we were restless, still jittery from the journey and my luggage-related humiliation. So we walked. This was where the real discovery began, though I did not know it yet. We had no plan, no guidebook, just a vague intention to stretch our legs before the light went. The cottage sits on one of those little inlets that finger their way into the Blekinge coast, and we followed a path that seemed to lead nowhere in particular, past another cottage, then another, each one tucked into the rocks with its own little jetty and its own little boat.

The path petered out. We carried on anyway, pushing through some low birch scrub, and suddenly found ourselves on a slab of granite that sloped gently down to the water, completely hidden from anywhere, completely private. The afternoon sun was doing that low golden thing that makes Sweden in late summer feel almost unbearably lovely. We sat. We had not brought refreshments because we were amateurs, but we sat anyway, and watched a heron work its way along the shoreline with the patience of something that has never once worried about a wheelie case.

That evening, properly chastened by our own incompetence, we drove into Solvesborg proper. It is not a large place, which suits me. We found a little restaurant down near the harbour, nothing fancy, just fish that had been swimming that morning and potatoes that tasted of something. The waiter, when he heard about our journey, nodded sagely. "The road to Sandviken," he said, "it is not so easy." This, I realised, was the local equivalent of "you're an idiot," delivered with such gentleness that I barely minded.

We got lost again the next morning, deliberately this time. Took a wrong turning on a forest track near the cottage, found ourselves at a tiny beach where someone had left a rope swing hanging from an oak tree. No sign, no car park, no indication that anyone else had been there in weeks. The water was cold enough to take your breath properly away, but we swam anyway, and dried off on rocks that had been warmed by centuries of sun.

That became the pattern of the week. Not the grand sights, though I am sure Blekinge has those. The accidental places. The inlet we found by following a deer path. The little jetty where an old man was repairing nets and showed us, without much English but with considerable patience, how to tie a proper knot. The bakery in a village whose name I never properly caught, where the cinnamon buns were still warm and the coffee came in heavy porcelain cups.

I kept thinking about my suitcase, tumbling down that lane. The indignity of it. The ridiculousness. And yet, without that moment of complete helplessness, would I have been so ready to accept whatever came? There is something about being thoroughly humbled by your own incompetence that opens you up to a place, I think. You stop trying to manage everything, to tick boxes, to see the right things in the right order. You just let yourself be where you are, which in our case was often somewhere we had not the faintest intention of being.

On our last evening, we found our way back to that first granite slab, the one we had stumbled upon. We were better prepared this time, armed with a bottle of something local and some of those excellent biscuits from the mystery bakery. The heron was there again, or perhaps another heron. The light did its golden thing. My partner observed, not for the first time, that I was hopeless with luggage, hopeless with directions, and generally hopeless in ways too numerous to list. I agreed. It seemed, in that moment, like a fair summary of my character, but not an entirely damning one.

The cottage waited for us, red and white against the green, with its little porch and its view of water that had been there long before us and would be there long after. I thought about all the places we had found by not finding what we were looking for. There is a lesson in that, probably, though I am not the person to articulate it cleanly. Something about the value of not quite knowing where you are, and being alright with that. Something about the particular sweetness of discoveries you never planned to make.

We packed the next morning with considerably more care. The broken case went in the boot first, held together with the same hairband, a small monument to my ongoing inadequacy. I took one last look at Sandviken, at the lane where my underwear had made its bid for freedom, and I felt something suspiciously like gratitude. For the place, certainly. For the unexpectedness of it. But also, I think, for my own capacity to get things wrong, and to keep going anyway, and to find, in the going, something I could not possibly have found any other way.