I have never been particularly good with directions, which is how I found myself standing in a cow field three miles from anywhere, clutching a wheelie suitcase and wondering if Swedish cows understood English profanity. The sat nav had given up on me somewhere outside Borgholm, and my phone battery had committed suicide after I used it to photograph every windmill between the bridge and what I hoped was Gillberga. The mishap, if I am being generous with myself, involved a left turn that was definitely not a left turn, a gravel track designed for tractors, and a sudden realisation that the red wooden house in the distance was not my holiday let but someone's actual home, whose owner waved at me with the resigned patience of a person who has watched too many lost tourists urinate in his hedgerow.

Forty minutes, one slightly teary phone call to the property manager, and a rescue mission involving a woman called Ingrid in a Volvo estate later, I finally arrived at Gillberga proper. And honestly? The getting lost made the arrival sweeter. The house sat among proper countryside, the kind that smells of pine and salt and whatever magic Swedes pump into their air. Red paint, white trim, the whole honest-to-goodness picture postcard. I stood there with my stupid suitcase and felt that particular hum of foolishness that follows you when you have made something simple into an epic saga.

The first thing you notice about this corner of Oland, once you have stopped being an idiot, is how quietly spectacular it is. Not spectacular in the way of mountains or dramatic coastlines, though the island has its moments. Spectacular in the way of ordinary things done beautifully. The light, for one. It falls differently there, flatter somehow, making everything look slightly painted. I dumped my bags and walked the immediate area without purpose, still jittery from my navigational disaster, and found myself on a narrow track between fields that led to a small lake I later learned was nameless, or at least nobody had bothered to name it on any map I could find.

That became the pattern. Getting lost on purpose, or what I told myself was on purpose. The first morning I set out for what I thought was the nearest village and ended up at a farm shop selling honey and woollen socks, run by a man who spoke approximately twelve words of English and used all of them to explain why his honey was superior to supermarket honey. He was right, by the way. I bought two jars and a pair of socks that are genuinely the warmest things I own.

The joy of Oland, I discovered, is in these accidental discoveries. The proper road to Borgholm is fine, useful even. But the parallel track through the woods, the one you take because you saw a deer and followed it like a child in a fairy tale, that is where you find the ruined stone wall that once marked a boundary nobody remembers, or the clearing where someone has left a single wooden bench facing nothing in particular except trees and sky.

I found a beach this way. Not the organised ones near town, with their proper facilities and families doing proper family things. A cove, really, accessible by a path that started as a footpath and degenerated into something between a suggestion and a challenge. I sat on rocks that were probably older than my entire country and watched the Baltic do its grey-green shifting thing, and felt the particular smugness of a person who has stumbled upon something they did not earn and cannot keep.

The self-reflection came later, on my final evening, walking back from another wrong turn that had delivered me to a small chapel I could find again only by deliberately getting lost a second time. I am not someone who naturally wanders. I plan, I research, I read reviews. My journey to Gillberga had been planned with spreadsheets and optimism. And yet the moments I valued most came from incompetence, from surrendering to the possibility that not knowing where I was might be preferable to knowing exactly.

The property itself was lovely, of course. Clean, comfortable, that particular Scandinavian talent for making simplicity feel luxurious. I cooked terrible meals in its kitchen and ate them on its terrace, watching light fade across fields I still could not name. But when I think of that week, I think of the wrong paths. The cow field, obviously. The nameless lake. The honey man and his socks. The cove that required a small act of faith to reach.

I left Oland with more than I arrived with, and not just the honey and the woollen footwear. A slightly bruised ego, certainly. But also something less definable, a loosening of the need to always know precisely where I am going. I am not converted to full chaos, mind. I still plan my journeys. But I leave room now for the wrong turn, the unmarked path, the possibility that the destination I planned might be less interesting than the place I accidentally find. The sat nav remains in my car, sulking and silent. I have not yet replaced it. Some things, I have learned, are better reached by getting properly, thoroughly, magnificently lost.