The trouble started, as it so often does, with me being absolutely certain I knew where I was going. I'd punched "Borlange, Dalarna" into the sat nav back at Stockholm Arlanda, patted myself on the back for my excellent preparation, and settled in for what Google Maps promised would be a breezy two-and-a-half-hour drive north. Three hours later, I found myself down a gravel track, surrounded by pine trees that looked increasingly judgmental, staring at a sign that definitely said "Vikarbyn" and definitely did not say "Borlange." I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere near Falun, distracted by a particularly handsome red wooden church, and now my little hire car was making that concerning grinding noise it reserves for surfaces it fundamentally disapproves of.

I did what any sensible person would do: carried on driving deeper into the woods, because apparently my brain processes "lost" as "commit harder."

What happened next still makes me grin. The track widened, the trees parted, and there was a lake. Not just any lake, but one of those absurdly perfect Swedish affairs, flat as glass, with a single wooden jetty and a family of ducks conducting important duck business near the reeds. No signposts, no car park, no other humans whatsoever. I later learned this was somewhere near Lake Runn's quieter edges, though precisely where remains a mystery. I sat on that jetty for a good forty minutes, sharing a packet of crisps I'd bought at Arlanda and feeling rather pleased with my spectacular navigational failure.

Finding the actual holiday home in Borlange proper took another hour of increasingly creative guesswork. The property, when I finally located it, turned out to be one of those classic Swedish timber houses, painted that particular Falu red that somehow looks exactly right against all the green. My host had left the key in a code box with a note: "Hope drive was okay!" I laughed for longer than was strictly necessary.

The next morning, determined to continue my accidental approach to tourism, I set out with no particular destination and a flask of coffee. Borlange itself is pleasant enough in a practical Swedish town sort of way, but I was hunting for more of whatever I'd stumbled into the day before. I found it by taking a left where my phone suggested right, following a sign to something called "Torsang" simply because I liked the sound of it.

Torsang turned out to be a village that time had gently passed by, all low wooden houses and a tiny harbour where a man was mending nets with the unhurried precision of someone who has never once checked a smartphone. We communicated in that peculiar mixture of gestures, broken English, and mutual goodwill that makes travelling alone actually worthwhile. He pointed me toward a path, and I walked for perhaps two miles through birch forest that smelled of summer and resin, emerging at another lake, this one with a floating sauna that appeared to belong to no one and everyone.

I did not use the sauna. I am British. I admired it from a respectful distance and drank my coffee.

The pattern established itself over the following days. A wrong turning near Romme Alpin led me to a meadow where wild strawberries grew in ridiculous profusion. Following what I thought was a shortcut back from the Kupolen shopping centre took me past a smallholding where two goats with magnificent horns watched me with evident disdain. Each evening I'd return to the timber house with grass-stained trousers and some small trophy: a particularly fine pine cone, a photograph of a dragonfly that had permitted me unusually close proximity, the memory of a conversation I hadn't quite understood but had thoroughly enjoyed.

On my final morning, I tried to find that first lake again, the one with the jetty. I failed, naturally. The same track seemed to lead somewhere entirely different, or perhaps I was simply no longer capable of getting lost in precisely the right way. I took it as a lesson of sorts. Some places, it seems, only reveal themselves when you have absolutely no business being there at all.