I’d barely turned off the A12 when the satnav decided to play silly beggars, rerouting me down a single-track lane that grew narrower with every bramble-scratched mile. By the time Driftwood’s whitewashed gate appeared, I was convinced I’d taken a wrong turn into someone’s back garden. The key safe was exactly where the host promised, yet the latch stuck, and I ended up wrestling the door with a carrier bag of still-warm sausage rolls balanced on my knee. The pastry bag split, naturally, scattering crumbs across the doormat like edible confetti.

Inside, the cottage felt like it had been waiting for me. Sunlight slanted through salt-streaked windows onto a scrubbed pine table, and the faint scent of woodsmoke lingered from the wood-burner. I dumped my bag, grabbed the sausage-roll survivors, and stepped straight out onto the shingle. The tide was out, leaving a mirror of sky between the groynes, and I wandered without any real plan, letting the crunch underfoot decide my route.

A narrow gap between two dunes caught my eye—nothing marked on the map, just a sandy dip that looked like it might lead somewhere interesting. I followed it and promptly got properly lost. Instead of the expected beach path, I found myself on a half-hidden track that wound between whispering reeds and low hawthorn. The only sound was the occasional plop of a moorhen and the distant sigh of waves. After ten minutes of second-guessing every fork, the track opened onto a tiny, almost private shingle cove tucked behind an old pillbox. No one else was there, just a driftwood bench someone had nailed together years ago and a colony of terns wheeling overhead.

I sat with my slightly battered lunch, watching the birds skim the shallows, and realised how rarely I let myself wander without an agenda. Back at Driftwood an hour later—having retraced my steps by following my own earlier footprints in the sand—the kettle was already on, thanks to an automatic timer I’d forgotten about. Steam fogged the kitchen window while I replayed the morning’s unplanned detour, crumbs still clinging to my jacket. It struck me that getting briefly, gloriously lost had been the real welcome to Suffolk, and Driftwood had simply been the quiet place I returned to afterwards, ready for whatever the next wrong turn might bring.