I should have known the holiday proper had begun when the sat-nav tried to send me down what was clearly a tractor path. We'd flown into Gothenburg, collected a Volvo that felt comically sensible, and set off east toward Smaland with that particular optimism that comes from having packed too many jumpers and not enough actual food. The plan was simple: find our holiday let near Hok, somewhere between Jonkoping and Skillingaryd, and collapse.

What happened instead was forty minutes of increasingly tense rural navigation, my partner studiously examining the map while I insisted the sat-nav "probably knew a shortcut." It did not. The shortcut deposited us at a farmyard where three dogs and one deeply unimpressed farmer assessed our predicament. I wound down the window with what I hoped was charming ineptitude and managed to ask for directions in a Swedish that sounded, to my ears, like a confused toddler. He pointed back the way we'd come. Of course he did.

The property, when we finally found it, sat among birch and pine with that particular stillness you only get in proper countryside. A red wooden house with white trim, exactly as advertised, looking out over a lake I hadn't fully appreciated existed. The key was in a lockbox, the code worked first time, and I experienced that small triumph of the technologically adequate. Inside smelled of pine and slightly damp wool, which I found oddly comforting. My partner opened the wrong cupboard looking for glasses and discovered a board game collection from approximately 1987. We would later become unreasonably competitive at something called "Fia med knuff," which I still don't fully understand but lost badly.

The real discovery came the next morning, when I attempted a run and promptly got lost within ten minutes. The track I'd chosen petered out into mossy forest floor, and I stood there in my inadequate trainers realising I had no phone signal and a questionable sense of direction. Rather than panic, I walked. That's when I found the first hidden thing: a small clearing with a fire pit and a rough wooden bench, clearly used by someone local for evening contemplation or possibly illicit cigarettes. I sat. The silence was so complete I could hear my own heartbeat, which was both unsettling and rather wonderful.

From that wrong turn, I developed a method. Each day I'd set out with vague intention and permit myself deviation. A road that looked interesting became a track to a lake smaller than my living room, where I watched a heron fish with embarrassing patience. Another wrong turning led to a village shop that sold cloudberry jam and fishing line, where an elderly woman explained, through gestures and my broken Swedish, that she'd lived there sixty years and still found new paths.

My partner, more sensibly equipped with ordnance survey instincts, nonetheless joined my increasingly erratic explorations. We found a swimming spot where the water was brown with tannin and surprisingly warm, accessed by a path that started between two identical-looking pines. We found a cafe, if you can call a shed with a coffee machine and homemade cinnamon buns a cafe, open apparently when the owner felt like it. We found it open once, by accident, and talked for an hour with a man who kept bees and talked about his queens with the pride of a parent at graduation.

The thing about getting properly lost is that it strips away the performance of tourism. You're not checking sights off a list; you're simply present in a place, noticing how the light falls through spruce needles, how the forest changes character from birch to pine to something denser and older. I stopped worrying about efficient use of time, which for someone who plans bathroom breaks is genuinely radical.

On our final evening, we returned to that first fire pit I'd found, now equipped with matches and sausages from the one supermarket we'd located through similar accidental navigation. We burned things imperfectly, ate charred food, and watched the sky do that prolonged northern dusk that lasts for hours. I thought about the farmer's dogs, the sat-nav's betrayal, my terrible Swedish. None of it mattered. The getting lost had become the point entirely.