I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up circling the same roundabout in Uddevalla three times before realising my sat nav had quietly given up on me entirely. There I was, proudly driving my hire car through Vastra Gotaland, feeling terribly Nordic and capable, when the little voice simply stopped mid-sentence and left me to fend for myself. I took the third exit eventually, purely on instinct, and promptly found myself down a narrow lane between two wooden houses that looked like they had been built in happier, simpler times.

That wrong turn, as it happened, led me straight to the holiday cottage I had booked, though from entirely the wrong direction. The owner, a friendly chap called Lars who appeared to have been waiting on his porch with a cup of tea, simply nodded as if this happened to everyone. "The sat nav here," he said, in that wonderfully understated Swedish way, "she likes to make her own choices." I liked him immediately.

The cottage itself sat tucked between birch trees and a slope that led down towards the water, though from where I stood, panting slightly after hauling my case up the gravel path, I could only catch glimpses of the fjord through the branches. Lars handed me the keys and vanished with remarkable speed, leaving me to explore alone. This suited me perfectly. I have always preferred the first few moments of a new place without commentary, the private discovery of where the light falls in the afternoon and which floorboard creaks loudest.

I dumped my bags with theatrical exhaustion and set off on what I told myself would be a brief wander to stretch my legs. The lane continued past the cottage, narrowing to little more than a track, and I followed it without purpose, still slightly giddy from my navigational triumph. Within five minutes I had stumbled upon a small clearing where someone, years ago, had placed a single wooden bench facing the water. There was no sign, no plaque, no indication that anyone else had sat there recently. The paint was peeling to that particular shade of grey that Scandinavian weather achieves so effortlessly. I sat down, feeling rather pleased with my accidental discovery, and watched a heron stand motionless in the reeds below.

The following morning I deliberately set out without my phone, determined to get properly lost. This proved embarrassingly easy. I took a left where I should have continued straight, found myself on a path that grew progressively muddier, and eventually emerged beside a tiny inlet where three small boats sat chained to a rusting ring in the rock. An elderly woman was picking something from the seaweed, and we nodded at each other in the manner of people who have both chosen solitude and do not wish to explain themselves. I later learned this spot had no particular name, or at least none that appeared on any map I could find.

By the third day, getting lost had become my entire strategy. I would set off after breakfast with a flask of coffee and no destination, taking whichever turning looked least promising. This is how I found the overgrown orchard behind what I initially thought was an abandoned farmhouse, only to spot washing on a line and beat a hasty retreat. It is how I discovered the concrete steps leading nowhere in particular, descending through bracken towards a stretch of shoreline where the stones were rounded and warm and entirely empty of other humans.

One afternoon, thoroughly disoriented after following a stream inland, I emerged onto a minor road and recognised absolutely nothing. A man cycling past stopped without my asking, pointed wordlessly towards a gap in the trees, and cycled on. The gap became a path, the path became a track, and the track delivered me to a viewpoint I would never have found deliberately, where the whole of the fjord opened out below and the afternoon light turned everything briefly golden. I sat on a rock and felt that particular combination of achievement and insignificance that only comes from accidental discovery.

I began to understand something about myself during that week, though I would not call it profound. I have spent years planning holidays with military precision, checking reviews and coordinates and opening hours, and there I was having the best time simply by surrendering to uncertainty. The getting lost became the point. The wrong turns were not mistakes but invitations. I thought about this rather too seriously one evening, sitting on that first bench with a mediocre sandwich, and laughed at my own pretension. It was just a nice bench. That was enough.

On my final morning I tried to retrace my steps to the nameless inlet with the chained boats, wanting to say a sort of goodbye to the place, and could not find it. I wandered for an hour, increasingly confused, until I emerged somewhere entirely new and sat down in mild defeat. A squirrel watched me from a branch with what I chose to interpret as sympathy. I never did find that inlet again, which seems exactly right. Some places should remain accidental, available only to those who are not looking for them, discovered once and then released back into possibility. I drove home eventually, taking the first exit at the roundabout without hesitation, and the sat nav stayed silent the entire way, which I prefer to believe was approval.