I have always believed that the best holidays begin with something going slightly wrong, and our trip to Branas in Syssleback did not disappoint. We had been driving up from Karlstad, full of that smug energy you get when you think you have beaten the sat nav, when I confidently turned onto what I insisted was a "scenic shortcut." My partner, who has learned to treat my shortcuts with the same scepticism usually reserved for email scams from foreign princes, sat in silence for approximately forty minutes before asking if I noticed that the tarmac had disappeared some time ago. The gravel track grew narrower, birch branches scratched the hire car like an angry cat, and I began rehearsing my apology speech. Then, quite suddenly, the trees parted and there it was: a small wooden jetty, a mirror-still lake, and a family of ducks who looked at us with the weary tolerance of locals who have seen this before.

We were not lost, I announced. We had discovered something.

The proper arrival at our Branas cabin happened an hour later, after reversing back through my so-called shortcut with what dignity remained. The cabin sat among pines near the shore of Lake Foxen, red paint fading to that particular Swedish pink that happens when weather does the decorating. I immediately tried to unlock the door using the wrong key, then the wrong door, before realising I was at the neighbouring cabin entirely. The actual key was in my pocket the whole time, naturally. My partner photographed this moment for posterity and what she calls "evidence."

But here is the thing about getting properly lost in Varmland: it rewards the foolish. That wrong cabin sat empty, its porch facing a clearing where blueberries grew in such profusion that I filled my hat with them, feeling like a bear who had stumbled upon a picnic. The lake path I took the next morning, thinking it looped back to our cabin, instead delivered me to a rocky outcrop where an elderly man sat fishing in complete silence. He offered me coffee from a thermos without speaking, and we watched a heron stand motionless in the reeds for twenty minutes. I never learned his name. I never found that exact rock again, though I searched twice.

The forest around Branas does not tolerate purposeful walking. Trails appear and vanish like gossip. I set out one afternoon with a map, a compass, and genuine intentions, following what I believed was a marked path to a documented viewpoint. Two hours later I emerged from spruce trees onto a small meadow where someone had placed a single wooden bench facing nothing in particular except more trees. I sat there, slightly worried, slightly triumphant, eating the sandwiches I had packed and listening to a woodpecker perform what sounded like urgent construction work. This was not on any map I had studied. It was better.

My partner, who possesses actual navigation skills, found her own accidental treasures. A swim from a tiny beach where the water was so clear she could watch fish inspecting her toes. A cluster of chanterelle mushrooms growing in a formation so perfect she suspected gardening. A local noticeboard advertising a midsummer gathering that had happened three weeks prior, the paper faded but the invitation still somehow open, still somehow welcoming.

On our final evening, I attempted one last shortcut back from the lake. Darkness fell faster than I expected, the path dissolved into moss and uncertainty, and I used my phone torch with the desperate energy of someone who has not learned. Then the beam caught something: a small wooden shelter, presumably for hunters or hikers, with a guestbook inside protected from weather. The entries went back years. "Saw moose," someone had written. "Rain for two days, still beautiful." "Lost, then found." I added my own confession, signed with our names and the date, feeling part of something I had never planned to join.

We left Branas with muddy boots, a hat permanently stained blue, and no photographs of the famous viewpoints we had intended to visit. I would not recognise the proper trail markers if they introduced themselves. But I can tell you exactly where the heron stood, approximately where the bench faces nothing, and precisely how the dusk looked from that wrong turn I took on purpose the second time, once I understood what being lost in Varmland actually gives you.