I should have known the sat nav was up to no good when it tried to send us through a vineyard. Not alongside one, mind you, straight through the middle of it, rows of syrah vines flicking against the wing mirrors like we were in some sort of French car wash. My partner Dave just kept saying "recalculating" in that robotic voice, which stopped being funny after the third time and became genuinely annoying by the seventh.

We were aiming for a carnas near Saint-Paul-les-Fonss in Languedoc-Roussillon, some stone farmhouse affair we'd booked in a hurry after too much wine one Tuesday evening. The kind of booking you make with misplaced confidence, then spend the journey hoping it wasn't a terrible mistake.

The vineyard debacle was merely the opening act. We emerged onto a dirt track that grew progressively more dirt-like, the sort of road that starts as gravel and graduates to what I can only describe as "suspiciously agricultural." Dave, ever the optimist, announced we were "nearly there" approximately forty minutes before we actually were. I had begun to suspect we'd driven into a dimension where tarmac didn't exist.

Then the sat nav gave up entirely. Black screen. Dead as a doornail. Dave thumped it, because apparently that's how technology works in his world. It did not work. We were, by any reasonable definition, completely lost.

Here's where it gets interesting, though. Being lost in Languedoc-Roussillon is rather different from being lost somewhere genuinely unpleasant. We pulled over to argue about whose fault the dead sat nav was - mine, apparently, for not bringing the charger I didn't know we owned - and I noticed a sign pointing to something called the Gorges du Brian. Neither of us had heard of it. We went anyway, because what else were we going to do?

The gorge was extraordinary. Limestone cliffs rising on either side, a river that had carved its patient way through millennia of rock, and not a single other tourist in sight. We walked for perhaps an hour, following a path that seemed to belong more to goats than humans, and found a small waterfall where someone had wedged a wooden bench into a natural alcove. We sat there eating emergency motorway crisps and felt, rather absurdly, like we'd discovered something secret.

Back in the car, still lost, we took another random turning and stumbled upon a village called Minerve. Not the famous Minerve with the siege history - that's the other one, we learned later - but a tiny cluster of houses with a mairie the size of a garden shed and a cat that followed us for twenty minutes hoping we had food. We did not, and I felt genuinely guilty about this.

By now we were genuinely laughing about our predicament, the kind of helpless laughter that comes from accepting you're completely out of control. We stopped at a vineyard - a proper one this time, with an actual entrance - and bought a bottle of Minervois from a woman who seemed genuinely surprised to see customers. She gave us handwritten directions to Saint-Paul-les-Fonss, which involved landmarks like "the bent oak tree" and "where the road smells of lavender."

We found the carnas eventually, of course. Stone walls, shuttered windows, that particular silence of the French countryside that makes British birdsong sound frankly rowdy. It was beautiful, and we were too exhausted and elated to do anything except open that bottle of Minervois and sit on the terrace watching the light fade across hills we'd accidentally come to know better than we'd ever planned.

The sat nav never recovered. Dave threw it in a bin in Beziers on the way home, with what I felt was unnecessary ceremony. I kept the handwritten directions, though, folded in my wallet still, a reminder that sometimes the wrong turning takes you exactly where you needed to go.