We’d only been on the road an hour when the satnav decided we were clearly in need of an adventure, sending us down a lane so narrow the wing mirrors kissed the hedges. By the time we spotted the little blue sign for Ty Llwyd, I’d already reversed into the same friendly neighbour’s gatepost twice and was muttering about technology being overrated. The cottage itself sat just back from the sweep of Llandudno’s quieter western beach, its slate roof and whitewashed walls looking exactly like the photos—except the photos hadn’t mentioned the seagull that dive-bombed my coffee the moment I stepped out of the car.

Inside, everything smelled faintly of toast and sea air. We dumped our bags, made a pot of tea, and decided to stretch our legs before the light faded. The plan was simple: follow the promenade west until we fancied an ice cream. Instead we took a left too early, wandered past a row of pastel beach huts, and found ourselves on a gravel track that wasn’t on any map we’d glanced at. Half an hour later we were standing on a tiny stretch of sand tucked between two low headlands, completely empty except for a driftwood bench and a colony of oystercatchers arguing over a mussel.

We spent the next morning deliberately getting lost again. A footpath behind the cottage climbed through bracken and came out above a hidden cove where rock pools glittered like someone had scattered green glass. My partner spent twenty minutes trying to identify every limpet while I sat on a flat stone and watched the tide creep in around my boots. Later, following what we thought was a shortcut back to the main road, we stumbled across a tiny honesty-box café in a converted fisherman’s shed—strong coffee, still-warm Welsh cakes, and a honesty jar that looked as though it hadn’t been emptied since last summer.

By the third evening we’d stopped pretending we had any sense of direction. We simply followed whichever lane looked least likely to lead anywhere useful and usually ended up somewhere lovely: a bench overlooking boatyard cranes silhouetted against the sunset, a pocket of dunes where the marram grass whispered, or a bench outside the lifeboat station where an old chap told us the tide times better than any app. Each time we set out intending to “just have a quick look,” we returned later than planned, shoes full of sand and pockets full of shells we’d convinced ourselves were too pretty to leave behind.

What surprised me most wasn’t how easy it was to get gloriously lost within a mile of Ty Llwyd; it was how little I minded. Usually I’m the one tapping at maps and worrying about dinner reservations, but here the map could wait. The sea kept pulling us sideways, the lanes kept curving away from where we meant to go, and every accidental turning felt like the place we’d actually been heading all along.