I have never been so pleased to see a road sign for apples in my entire life. There we were, my partner and I, forty minutes past our estimated arrival time, circling what I was fairly certain was the same field of rapeseed for the third time, when a hand-painted placard reading "Kiviks Musteri" loomed through the windscreen like a beacon from a friendlier dimension. We had, in classic fashion, followed the sat nav's cheerful instruction to "turn left where possible" onto a farm track that grew progressively more agricultural until it deposited us in a tractor turning circle with a view of absolutely nothing recognisable.

The mishap, if you want to call it that, was entirely my fault. I had insisted on taking "the scenic route" from Simrishamn, having glanced briefly at a map that morning over coffee. My partner, wisely, had said nothing. They know me well enough by now. The scenic route had become the only route, then the wrong route, then apparently a route that existed chiefly in the imagination of whichever algorithm was currently torturing us.

But here is the thing about getting properly lost in Skane. You stumble upon things. That first wrong turning took us past a barn where an elderly chap was restoring what looked like a 1960s Volvo, and he waved us down not to help with directions but simply to show us the engine. We stood there in the late afternoon light, making appreciative noises about carburettors we did not understand, while his dog performed a slow orbit of our legs. He never did tell us his name. Just pointed vaguely eastward and said "Kivik is that way, more or less," which proved accurate enough if you interpreted "more or less" generously.

We found our holiday cottage eventually, of course. It sits on the edge of things, not quite in Kivik proper, not quite anywhere else either, surrounded by orchards that in late summer hang heavy with fruit you are technically not supposed to sample but absolutely do. The property itself is the sort of unassuming Swedish summer house that reveals its character slowly: a bit of weatherboarding here, a thoughtfully placed window seat there, a garden that has clearly been loved by someone with more patience for perennials than I will ever possess. We dumped our bags and immediately went walking without a map, because I had learned absolutely nothing.

The coast path, we discovered by simply heading toward the sound of gulls, leads to coves that feel borrowed from a different century. We found one little beach, barely twenty metres of shingle, where someone had arranged driftwood into a rough bench facing the Baltic. No sign explained it. No Instagram location tag would ever lead you there. We sat for an hour watching a fishing boat work its way along the horizon, and I found myself thinking about how much of my travelling life has been spent arriving at places already described to death, already photographed from every angle, already slightly disappointing because the reality can never match the curated expectation.

Getting lost strips all that away. The next morning we took our coffee in the opposite direction from anything recommended, following a lane that narrowed until it became a track, then a path between two drystone walls. A woman was picking blackberries from the hedgerow, and we got talking, and she mentioned a bakery in a village I cannot now name that operates from someone's converted garage on Saturday mornings only. We found it the following day by the simple method of continuing to get lost until the smell of cardamom buns became undeniable.

That bakery, as it happened, was where we finally met our cottage's previous occupants, a Danish couple who had been coming to the same area for fifteen years and who shared their own collection of accidental discoveries: a swimming spot where the rocks form natural shelves, a farm shop that sells cheese from a window on trust, a stretch of woodland where the bluebells apparently go on for weeks. None of it was in any guidebook they had ever seen. All of it came from wrong turnings, from following curiosity rather than instructions, from the particular humility of admitting you have no idea where you are and finding that the world opens up rather than closes down.

I am still not entirely sure I could find that bakery again. My partner, who has a better sense of direction and a more reliable memory for landmarks involving cardamom, probably could. But there is something in the not-knowing that I have come to value. The cottage itself became part of this rhythm of accidental discovery. We found that the best light for reading was in a corner we had initially dismissed, that the garden's evening chorus of birds peaked at a time we would normally have been inside cooking, that the nearby orchard path we assumed was private was in fact a public right of way used by locals as a shortcut to the sea.

On our final evening, we got lost one last time. Intentionally, this time, though I pretended otherwise. We followed a lane we had noticed on one of our earlier wanderings, one that seemed to lead toward a stand of beech trees visible from the cottage's upstairs window. It petered out into a field edge, then a path through grazing land where sheep regarded us with the tolerant indifference of creatures who have seen many confused humans. The path emerged suddenly onto a rise with a view I had not expected: the whole coast laid out, Kivik's harbour tiny in the distance, the Baltic stretching to a horizon that seemed to hold the last of the summer light like something precious and about to depart.

We stood there until the midges became insistent, and I thought about how this particular holiday would stay with me. Not for any single sight or experience, but for the cumulative weight of small accidents, of wrong turnings that became right ones, of a landscape that rewarded the wandering rather than the planned. I am not sure I will ever be the sort of person who travels without some kind of intention. But Skane, and that particular cottage on its edge of nowhere, has taught me to hold those intentions lightly, to leave room for the unplanned, to trust that getting lost is sometimes simply another way of finding what you did not know you were looking for.