I should have known the holiday proper had begun when I tried to unlock the wrong cottage. There we were, knackered from the drive up from Copenhagen, wheeling suitcases down a gravel track in northern Skane, and I marched straight up to a little red house with white trim that looked, to my travel-fogged brain, exactly like the photos. The key fob refused to turn. I jiggled it. I swore at it. I nearly kicked the door. Then a curtain twitched in the window, and a very confused Swedish pensioner peered out at me. Wrong cottage. Ours was fifty metres further on, hidden behind a birch thicket. My partner has not let me live this down.

But that wrong turn set the tone for the whole week. We had arrived at our Haessleholm cottage intending to do very little, perhaps a bit of lake swimming, some reading, the occasional trip to the ICA supermarket for supplies. What we did instead was stumble into things.

The cottage itself was a proper charmer. Red wooden cladding, a little veranda with creaky chairs, and a garden that melted into pine forest. The first morning, I went out to investigate the compost bin and took a wrong bearing coming back. Instead of the cottage, I found a narrow path I had not noticed before, winding through dense spruce. Ten minutes of mildly panicked walking later, the trees opened onto a small clearing with a tarn I never knew existed. No sign, no fence, no other soul. Just black water and dragonflies. I swam in my pants, dried on a flat rock, and found my way back by following the smell of my partner making coffee.

That became our rhythm. Deliberately losing ourselves. The area around Haessleholm is criss-crossed with these unmarked trails, old farm tracks, and footpaths that do not appear on any map we downloaded. One afternoon, cycling towards what we thought was a nature reserve, we missed a turning and ended up at a disused railway line converted to a gravel cycle path. We followed it for miles through tunnel-like corridors of beech and oak, emerging eventually at a tiny halt where an elderly man had set up an honesty stall selling homegrown strawberries and jars of cloudberry jam. We bought both, ate the strawberries immediately, and sat on the platform edge like characters in a slow Swedish film.

Another time, attempting to reach a recommended swimming lake, we took a left where we should have gone right and found ourselves in a village so small it barely qualified. But there was a community garden, unlocked and unguarded, with rows of perfect vegetables and a handwritten note inviting visitors to help themselves to herbs. We took dill and chervil, feeling like proper foragers, and made a fish supper that evening with nothing else but butter and salt.

The mishaps continued, of course. I cycled into a ditch avoiding a hare. We spent twenty minutes trying to order fika from a shed that turned out to be someone's actual shed, not the advertised cafe fifty metres along. But each wrong turn delivered something the planned route would not have. A meadow full of orchids. A stream where we watched a kingfisher for ten motionless minutes. A barn with a faded mural of folk dancers peeling in the sun.

By the end, I stopped checking maps entirely. My partner would ask which way, and I would shrug and point vaguely towards something interesting. We found a ruined windmill this way, its stone base covered in moss, no information board, no heritage trail. Just a thing that existed, that someone had built and abandoned, that now belonged to the cows who wandered through its shadow.

The last evening, we walked from our cottage with no destination, took a path we had not tried, and found ourselves at a small lake we had somehow missed all week. The sun was dropping through birch trees, the water was still, and somewhere a woodpecker was doing its mechanical drumming. We sat on a fallen trunk and watched the light change. Neither of us spoke much. There seemed nothing necessary to add.

I had arrived thinking I needed rest, structure, perhaps a bit of purposeful relaxation. What I got was something better: the particular joy of not knowing where you are, and not minding in the slightest. The wrong cottage, the wrong paths, the wrong everything. I would not change a single wrong turn.