I have always believed that the best holidays are the ones where you accidentally take a wrong turn and find something you never knew you were looking for. My recent trip to a little place called Stoellet in Varmland, Sweden, proved this theory beyond any doubt, though the journey there began with what I can only describe as a spectacular own goal.

We had flown into Oslo and hired a car, because apparently I enjoy making life complicated. The sat nav died somewhere past the Norwegian border, leaving us with nothing but my partner's phone, a patchy 3G signal, and my stubborn refusal to admit we were lost. I insisted we take a "scenic route" through the forests near Arvika, which turned out to be a gravel track barely wide enough for a determined badger. Twenty minutes of white-knuckle driving later, we emerged at a dead end beside a lake I could not name, next to a village I still cannot spell. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The look that says "I love you but I am absolutely telling everyone about this later."

Here is where the magic happened. We stopped to turn around, and there was a tiny wooden jetty jutting into water so still it looked like polished glass. An old man was sitting there with a fishing rod, not moving, apparently waiting for the fish to surrender out of sheer boredom. He nodded at us. We nodded back. It was possibly the most Swedish interaction I have ever had. We ended up sitting on that jetty for half an hour, eating emergency crisps from the glove box, watching the light change across the water. No plan, no purpose, just accidental peace.

When we finally reached Stoellet, it felt like arriving somewhere that had been keeping itself secret on purpose. The cottage sat among birch trees with red wooden walls that seemed to glow in the late afternoon sun. But here is the thing: we nearly missed it entirely. The proper turning was unmarked, hidden behind a bend where the road narrowed to nothing. I only spotted it because I was driving at approximately five miles per hour, still traumatised by the gravel track incident.

The next few days became a masterclass in glorious disorientation. We set out one morning to find a lake the owner had mentioned, took a path that definitely was not the right path, and stumbled into a clearing where someone had built a tiny sauna beside a stream. No sign, no explanation, just a wooden door and a pile of neatly chopped birch. We did not use it. It felt too private, too accidentally discovered, like reading someone else's diary. We sat on a nearby rock and listened to the water instead.

Another wrong turn led us to a farm selling cloudberry jam from an honesty box. The box had a handwritten note that said "Take jam. Leave money. Or don't. We trust you." I left far too much money. The guilt of the gravel track still weighed on me.

There was the time we followed what I swore was a walking trail and ended up at a cemetery from the 1700s, moss growing over stones carved with names too weathered to read. My partner found it morbid. I found it grounding, in that slightly uncomfortable way that makes you think about your own footprints in the world. We stood there in silence, two accidental trespassers in someone else's history.

By the end of the week, I stopped checking maps entirely. We found a swimming spot where locals apparently gather on Midsummer, though we had it to ourselves in late August. We found a rock formation that looked like a sleeping giant, or possibly just a rock, depending on how much local beer you had consumed. We found a cafe in what I am fairly certain was someone's front room, where an elderly woman served us cardamom buns and told us about her elk encounters in broken but enthusiastic English.

The cottage itself became our base for these little expeditions into the unknown. Mornings started with coffee on the deck, evenings ended with attempts to light the wood-burning stove without setting off the smoke alarm. I failed twice. The alarm was very loud. The neighbours, if there were any, were too polite to mention it.

What struck me most about Varmland was how it rewards the wandering. This is not a landscape that shouts for attention. It does not have the dramatic fjords of Norway or the manicured charm of the Swedish south. It has forests that go on forever, lakes that appear between trees without warning, and roads that seem to dead-end into nowhere before revealing some hidden continuation. You have to work for its secrets, or rather, you have to be willing to get slightly lost and see what finds you.

I think about that wrong turn near Arvika a lot now. The dead end, the old man, the emergency crisps. I could have been furious with myself, with the sat nav, with the universe. Instead, I got a moment of unexpected stillness that set the tone for everything that followed. There is a lesson in there somewhere, probably about letting go of control, though I am not quite ready to admit that to my partner just yet.

We left Stoellet with cloudberry jam, slightly damp walking boots, and a list of places we still could not find again if we tried. That feels right, somehow. Some discoveries are meant to stay hidden, waiting for the next person willing to take the wrong path.