The ferry from the mainland was meant to be the easy bit. I'd checked the timetable three times, smugly early, only to discover I'd been reading the summer schedule from 2019. The actual boat left forty minutes later, which I spent sat in the car eating an entire packet of digestives and arguing with the sat nav about whether Kalmar really existed.

By the time we reached Oland, I was already in that peculiar state of holiday delirium where everything feels slightly too bright. The bridge itself is a proper engineering flex, stretching across the Kalmar Strait like someone stretched out a metal ruler and thought, "that'll do." My partner drove; I navigated, badly. We missed the turning for Morbylanga twice because I was distracted by a field of apparently enormous rocks. "Those are sheep," she said. I didn't speak for ten minutes.

The cottage sat down a lane that our rental car absolutely did not appreciate. Gravel crunching, branches scraping, that particular anxiety of wondering if you've accidentally driven onto someone's private estate. Then suddenly it opened up: red wooden walls, white trim, the whole authentic Swedish summerhouse fantasy. A proper stuga, as they'd say, though I didn't know that yet. I would learn approximately four words of Swedish and deploy them with embarrassing confidence for the entire week.

The key was in a lockbox. The code worked first time, which felt suspicious. Inside smelled of pine and something faintly cinnamon, though that might have been my imagination or the digestives repeating. The main room had one of those wood-burning stoves that looks decorative but apparently keeps you alive in February. It was August. We opened every window.

Here's where I should mention the mishap properly. I'd been so proud of packing light. One bag each, very minimalist, very "we're proper travellers now." Except I'd left my bag on the ferry. Not in the car. On the ferry. On the actual boat, which was now somewhere else entirely, being very far away with all my trousers. The ferry company, when I finally reached them, were so politely baffled that I felt worse. "You left it... on the deck?" Yes. Near the bins. Where else would one leave a bag?

So my first impression of Morbylanga was experienced entirely in the clothes I'd travelled in, plus a borrowed pair of my partner's jogging bottoms that stopped somewhere around my shins. We walked to the village shop for emergency supplies, me waddling like a man preparing to ford a river. The woman behind the counter didn't blink. I suspect she'd seen worse. I bought a toothbrush, a t-shirt with a moose on it, and enough pickled herring to suggest I knew what I was doing. I did not.

That first evening, we wandered without purpose, which is how you're meant to do it, isn't it? The lane behind the cottage turned to dirt, then to grass between wheel ruts, then to something that was basically just a suggestion of where tractors might go. We followed it because there was a gap in the hedge that looked inviting. This is how discoveries happen, or how people end up in bogs. On Oland, it's often both.

The field beyond sloped down to something I later learned was called a "knapplock," one of those strange limestone pavement formations that litter the south of the island. To us, then, it was simply a place where the ground became interesting, full of shallow pools and strange plants that my plant app identified with decreasing confidence. "Possibly a succulent." "Maybe moss." "Unknown. Try another angle." I tried twelve angles. It remained unknown.

We sat on a flat rock as the light went that particular Scandinavian gold, the kind that lasts for hours because the sun is in no particular hurry. Somewhere, a skylark went up and up. My jogging bottoms were damp from a miscalculation with a puddle. I felt ridiculous and entirely present, which is perhaps the best combination a holiday can offer.

The bag arrived two days later, delivered by a man who found the whole episode deeply amusing in that restrained Swedish way. By then I'd worn the moose t-shirt to a proper restaurant, to a castle, to what I think might have been a private function that we accidentally joined. Nobody said anything. They were too polite, or too busy enjoying their own strange wanderings.

Oland rewards the lost, I've decided. The proper roads take you to the proper places, which are fine enough. But it's the gaps between, the tractor tracks and the sheep fields and the limestone flats that nobody advertises, where you actually find whatever it is you didn't know you were looking for. Usually damp trousers. Sometimes something better.