The sat nav gave up on us roughly halfway between Jonkoping and nowhere in particular, which is how we found ourselves bouncing down a gravel track in Smaland, convinced we'd either discovered a secret road or were about to become a local legend for all the wrong reasons. My partner was navigating using a printed map I'd insisted on bringing "just in case," except I'd folded it so many times that the crease ran directly through our supposed destination. "Hestra," I kept saying, as if repetition would conjure it from the pine trees. "It's meant to be near a lake. There's definitely a lake. Somewhere."

We'd been driving since breakfast, which in Swedish terms meant we'd consumed an unreasonable quantity of coffee and enough kanelbullar to make us slightly manic. The mishap, when it came, was entirely my fault. I'd spotted what I thought was a sign for swimming and bellowed "TURN HERE" with such conviction that my partner obeyed, sending us down an even narrower track that ended abruptly at a locked gate bearing a hand-painted sign about elk hunting. Reversing took twenty minutes, three arguments, and one mortifying wave to an actual elk hunter who emerged from the trees looking deeply unsurprised to find lost tourists in his Monday.

By the time we reached the proper turning for our holiday let, I'd developed a philosophical attitude toward being lost. This proved fortunate, because the proper turning wasn't particularly proper. The gravel continued, winding between granite outcrops and birch trees that seemed personally offended by our presence. Then suddenly, there it was: a red wooden house with white trim, exactly as Swedish as I'd dared hope, sitting beside a lake so still it looked like someone had forgotten to animate it.

The key was in a lockbox, which I opened with the code whilst my partner photographed a dragonfly the size of a small aircraft. Inside smelled of pine and something faintly vanilla that I later learned was the wood treatment they use on these old timber frames. The floors sloped charmingly. The windows were small and deep-set, as if the house had squinted at us suspiciously before deciding to let us stay.

I made tea immediately, because I am British and this is my coping mechanism. The kitchen overlooked the water, and I stood there with my mug realising that the getting lost had somehow become the point. We'd seen things no itinerary would have included: the elk hunter's compound, a meadow of wildflowers we later learned was private property (we didn't linger), a collapsed barn being slowly consumed by moss. Each wrong turn had shown us Smaland's actual face, not the polished version.

That evening we walked down to the lake without purpose, finding a small jetty that wasn't mentioned in any of our paperwork. My partner dangled her feet in water that must have been glacial melt, judging by her expression. A fish jumped somewhere out of sight, and we both laughed at nothing, at everything, at the peculiar relief of having nowhere particular to be.

The house had no immediate neighbours visible. The silence wasn't empty though; it was populated by birdsong and the occasional distant chainsaw, by water lapping against stones we'd never have found without my catastrophic navigation. I thought about how much of my travelling life I'd spent trying not to get lost, treating wrong turns as failures rather than offerings.

We stayed up too late, drinking wine on the sloping porch, watching the sky perform that prolonged Scandinavian dusk where it never quite commits to darkness. Tomorrow we'd probably try to find the proper local sights, the recommended walks, the things you're meant to do. But tonight belonged to the accidental discoveries, to the jetty and the elk hunter and the particular quality of gravel road that makes you slow down enough to actually see where you are.

I woke once in the night to absolute blackness and the sound of an owl, and felt briefly, wonderfully, as though the map had never existed at all.