The train from Copenhagen was meant to be the easy bit. I had my window seat, a packet of slightly stale crisps, and that smug feeling you get when you have actually planned something in advance. Then I looked at my ticket properly and realised I had booked myself to Ystad station three hours before I could actually collect the keys to the cottage. Brilliant. There I was, wheeling a suitcase that had developed a theatrical wobble down the platform, with nothing but time and my own poor reading comprehension to keep me company.

I decided to wander. How lost could one get in a small Skane town? Quite lost, as it turns out, and gloriously so. I took a wrong turn somewhere near the harbour and found myself on a narrow lane of weathered wooden houses, each one painted in colours that looked like they had faded gracefully over decades. An elderly chap was watering his tomatoes in a front garden no bigger than a picnic blanket. He nodded at me as if Americans lugging broken suitcases down his street were a daily occurrence. I nodded back, trying to look purposeful, and kept walking.

That first accidental discovery set the tone for the entire week. The cottage itself, when I finally collected the keys, turned out to be a tidy little place with a garden that backed onto nothing much at all. Or so I thought. On my second morning, still jet-lagged and wandering in my socks with a cup of tea, I noticed a gap in the hedge that I had assumed was just overgrown shrubbery. It led to a path, which led to a meadow, which led to a small pond where someone had long ago placed a single wooden bench facing the water. No sign, no fence, no indication that anyone else knew about it. I sat there until my tea went cold and a heron gave me a look of profound disappointment before flapping away.

Getting properly lost became my daily ritual. I would set out with vague intentions - perhaps the supermarket, perhaps a walk along the coast - and then deliberately take whichever turn looked least promising. Down a gravel track west of town, I stumbled across a farm shop operating out of what appeared to be someone's garage. The woman running it spoke no English and my Swedish extends to "tack" and "hej," but we managed through pointing and enthusiastic nodding. I left with cloudberries I had no idea how to use and a lump of cheese that I later learned was aged in a cave somewhere nearby. Both were tremendous.

The coast south of Ystad revealed itself in fragments. A proper beach would appear on a map, but the places I kept finding were smaller: a rocky outcrop where someone had arranged stones into a spiral, a cove accessible only by squeezing between two gorse bushes, a wooden jetty with no boat attached where I sat and watched the ferries to Poland crawl along the horizon. Each felt borrowed rather than visited, as if I had been let in on a secret that required no particular qualification beyond being in the wrong place at the right time.

One evening, thoroughly lost in what I think was the countryside northwest of town, I found a church with its door open. Inside smelled of wood polish and old stone. There was no one about, just a guestbook with entries going back years and a donation box with a handwritten note I could not read. I signed my name and added a line about being grateful for wrong turns. It felt slightly absurd and entirely sincere.

By the end of the week, my suitcase was heavier with unexpected purchases and my phone's map history looked like a child's scribble. I never did make it to some of the proper sights I had read about beforehand. The thought now seems almost comical, like planning to visit a friend's house and insisting on seeing only the rooms they had tidied in advance.

On my final morning, I returned to that bench by the pond with another cup of tea, this time wearing proper shoes. The heron was nowhere to be seen. I sat there wondering how many places like this I must walk past in ordinary life, how many gaps in hedges I never investigate because I am too busy being exactly where I intended to be. The answer, I suspect, is most of them. I finished my tea while it was still warm, found my way back through the hedge without tearing my jacket, and left for the station with my wobbling suitcase and absolutely no regrets about any of it.