I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up driving past the same red wooden barn three times before realising our sat nav had quietly given up on us somewhere near Falkoping. My partner sat in the passenger seat with that particular expression of British patience that is really just suppressed commentary, while I insisted the turning was "definitely just past this next bit of forest." It was not. It was back the other way, past a field of extremely judgmental-looking sheep.

We found Ljungsarp eventually, down a gravel track that made our little hire car sound like it was being gently but persistently dismantled. The cottage sat among birch trees with that particular Swedish stillness you do not quite believe until you experience it. No traffic hum, no distant aeroplanes, just the wind moving through leaves and what I later learned was a very confident local woodpecker.

The mishap, though, was the key. Because in our determined circling of the countryside, we had stumbled across things no guidebook had mentioned. A tiny lake, barely a puddle on the map, where someone had left a weathered rowing boat tied to a stump and a wooden bench facing the water like an invitation. We stopped because I needed to pretend I had meant to pull over, and ended up sitting there twenty minutes watching dragonflies stitch across the surface.

That became the pattern of the week. We set out each morning with vague intentions and promptly got ourselves charmingly lost. The lanes around Ljungsarp do not always bother with helpful signage. Some simply turn to grass and keep going, trusting you to work out whether you are on a track or someone's driveway. We chose wrong more often than right, and it was magnificent.

One afternoon a wrong turning delivered us to a farm shop so small it was essentially a shed with an honesty box and a fridge. The woman running it spoke approximately twelve words of English, which was twelve more than my Swedish. We communicated through pointing, enthusiastic nodding, and what I can only describe as interpretive gestures regarding cheese. I came away with something strongly flavoured and slightly terrifying that became the highlight of our evening meals.

Another time we followed a footpath that seemed to lead nowhere until it opened into a clearing where someone had built a proper Swedish wood-fired sauna beside a stream. No one was there, no indication of who owned it or whether visitors were welcome. We did not use it, of course. We simply sat on the rocks nearby feeling like we had discovered a secret, which I suppose we had.

The actual cottage had its own small lake, visible through the trees, and we would paddle about in the provided boat with no particular destination. One evening I rowed us directly into a patch of reeds because I was distracted by a heron. My partner did not even comment. Just handed me an oar and waited.

What struck me, looking back, was how little we missed having plans. The area around Ljungsarp does not shout for attention. It offers instead these quiet, accidental discoveries: the overgrown churchyard with graves dating to the 1700s, the village hall where someone had left a community notice board covered in handwritten announcements we could not read, the sudden view across rolling farmland that appeared around a bend like a painting we had not paid admission to see.

I am not naturally someone who wanders without purpose. I like a timetable, a reservation, the security of knowing where dinner is coming from. But Sweden in late summer, in that particular corner of Vastra Gotaland, gently untrained me. Getting lost stopped being failure and became the whole point.

On our final morning I tried to find that first little lake again, the one with the rowing boat. I failed, naturally. Drove down three wrong tracks, found two new ones instead, and returned to the cottage slightly muddy and entirely content. Some places, I think, are meant to stay lost. You visit them once by accident, and that is their gift to you.