I should have known the satnav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's back garden. There I was, halfway through a fourteen-hour drive from Gothenburg, convinced I was being clever by taking the scenic route through Varmland. The scenic route, as it turned out, involved a gravel track, a very confused moose, and me reversing for nearly a mile because I'd followed a sign that apparently meant "private forestry road" rather than "shortcut to charming lakeside accommodation."

By the time I finally rolled up to the Grums holiday home, I was in that peculiar state of mild hysteria where everything becomes either hilarious or deeply philosophical. The property sat there looking impossibly serene, all wooden cladding and generous windows, while I sat in the car laughing at my own stubbornness. I'd been determined to find something off the beaten track, and thanks to my spectacular navigational failure, I'd certainly managed that.

The owners had left the key in a little box by the door with a handwritten note about the boiler and a welcome packet of coffee that I nearly wept over. I dumped my bags, made the worst cup of coffee of my life because I couldn't work the Swedish measurements, and immediately set out to explore on foot. This was my first proper mistake of many, though at the time it felt like recovery.

I walked down what I assumed was a path to the lake and somehow ended up in a clearing I'd never find again if you paid me. There was an old wooden jetty, half-collapsed and covered in moss, jutting into water so still it looked like a photograph. I sat there for an hour. No phone signal, no map, no plan. Just the occasional fish breaking the surface and my own breathing slowing down to something approaching normal human pace.

The next morning I got properly lost. I'd intended a gentle stroll to what the local map called a "nature point" and instead found myself following a stream that grew progressively more enthusiastic about its downhill trajectory. My walking shoes, chosen for their urban respectability rather than any actual grip, turned the experience into a sort of involuntary slide. I grabbed at birch trees, apologised aloud to various birds I'd disturbed, and eventually popped out onto a proper road about three miles from where I'd started.

A woman was loading firewood into a shed. She looked at me with the complete lack of surprise that rural people reserve for idiots from cities. "You found the hidden waterfall then," she said. It wasn't a question. I hadn't, as it happened, noticed any waterfall in my desperate focus on remaining upright. She pointed back the way I'd come, explained something in Swedish that I mostly understood through gestures, and sent me back with a packet of dried mushrooms she'd pressed into my hands.

I did find the waterfall. It was perhaps twelve feet of enthusiastic water tumbling over reddish rocks, completely unmarked, completely unremarkable by dramatic standards, and completely perfect. I sat on a flat stone and ate the sandwich I'd packed, watching water that had found its own path regardless of what anyone had planned for it.

That became the pattern of the week. I'd set out with some modest intention and return with stories of accidental discovery. The bakery in Grums proper that I'd only found because I'd taken a wrong turn looking for the supermarket. The little beach where locals swim, unadvertised and unglamorous, with water so cold it steals your breath for three full seconds before your body adjusts. The forest trail that started behind a bus stop and led to a viewpoint over the lake that no brochure had mentioned.

I stopped planning after day three. The holiday home became my base for glorious uncertainty, my comfortable wooden refuge after each day's unscripted wandering. I'd return with damp shoes and a pocket of wild blueberries, make something simple on the stove, and sit on the terrace watching the light change over water I hadn't known existed a week before.

On my final morning I tried to find that first collapsed jetty again, the one that had started everything. I walked for two hours, following what I thought was the same path, and never found it. The forest had swallowed my tracks, or perhaps I'd never really known where I was to begin with. I laughed about it all the way back to the car, another wrong turn, another unexpected clearing, another moment of not knowing and not particularly minding.

I drove back to Gothenburg by the main road, satnav behaving itself, every turn signposted and sensible. It was efficient and dull and I found myself missing gravel tracks and confused wildlife. Some part of me had changed during that week of getting lost, though I couldn't quite name it. Perhaps just the realisation that my best moments had come from failed plans and stubborn wandering, from trusting my own foolish feet rather than any voice telling me where to go.

The dried mushrooms are still in my kitchen cupboard. I keep meaning to use them, and somehow I never do. They're my reminder that the best things find you when you're not looking, when you've gone wrong and kept going anyway.