I had been driving for the best part of three hours from Stockholm when I realised, with the sort of sinking feeling that only arrives alongside complete certainty, that I had been confidently following the wrong sat nav voice. Not my phone's voice, mind you, but my partner's voice, which had been reading directions from a screenshot taken three days prior. We were not, it turned out, five minutes from our holiday let in Strangnas. We were instead touring a housing estate somewhere west of Eskilstuna, surrounded by identical red wooden houses and one very confused postman who waved at us twice.

The actual property, when we finally found it, sat tucked down a gravel track that my car's suspension will not soon forgive. A traditional Swedish cottage, painted that particular Falun red that seems to glow against the greenery, with white trim so crisp it looked almost apologetic for our chaotic arrival. I stumbled out of the car, stretched my legs, and promptly walked into a low-hanging birch branch that the previous tenants had apparently never noticed.

The mishap of our journey, though, proved to be the making of our holiday. That wrong turn had taken us past Lake Malaren at a spot no guidebook mentions, where we had stopped for petrol and found a tiny beach with a homemade diving board and three local teenagers who nodded at us like we belonged there. We did not belong there. We had suitcases and a rental Skoda and the haunted expressions of people who had argued about navigation for forty minutes. But we stayed for twenty minutes, dipping our feet in water that was frankly Baltic, and it became the benchmark against which we measured everything else.

Strangnas itself, when we properly arrived, revealed itself in layers. The town centre, with its cathedral dominating the skyline, was pleasant enough in that understated Swedish way. But the real finds came from deliberate wandering. On our second morning, seeking coffee after another navigational disagreement, we turned down what I thought was a shortcut and found ourselves at a community garden so meticulously tended that I felt ashamed of my own windowsill basil. An elderly man named Goran was pruning something with surgical precision. He did not speak English. I do not speak Swedish. We discussed tomatoes for ten minutes through the universal language of gestures and shared shrugs.

The cottage became our base for getting gloriously, intentionally lost. We followed forest paths that petered out into clearings where someone had clearly once held parties, evidenced by fire rings and the occasional abandoned folding chair. We found a small jetty on a nameless inlet where I sat for an hour watching a heron that seemed equally uninterested in moving. My partner discovered a bakery in what appeared to be someone's converted garage, operating on honesty-box principles and producing cardamom buns that I still think about with inappropriate frequency.

What struck me most was how these accidents of navigation revealed a pace of life I had forgotten existed. Without the wrong turn, without the low-hanging branch, without the argument about whether that path definitely went somewhere or definitely did not, we would have had a perfectly nice holiday in a perfectly nice cottage. Instead we had something slightly messier, slightly more memorable, slightly more ours.

On our final evening, we attempted to recreate our original wrong turn and failed even at that. But we found a different beach, different teenagers, different water that was still too cold. I walked into a different branch. Some patterns, I suppose, are worth repeating.