I should have known the holiday proper had begun when our sat-nav tried to send us through a vineyard. Not alongside one, you understand, but directly through the middle, as if our Renault Clio had suddenly sprouted tractor wheels and a taste for Grenache grapes. My partner Dave, ever the optimist, declared it a shortcut. I, gripping the door handle like it owed me money, suggested perhaps the nice lady inside the device had had one too many pastis. We were an hour outside Rochefort-du-Gard, somewhere in the sun-baked labyrinth of Languedoc-Roussillon, and already gloriously, magnificently lost.

The property, when we finally found it, sat behind a modest stone wall with a wooden gate that squeaked like a startled mouse. I loved it instantly. Dave, still smarting from my commentary on his navigation skills, needed convincing. That came the moment we stepped through the front door and discovered the courtyard - a private little suntrap with a pool that winked at us in the afternoon light. The house itself was proper old stone, thick-walled and unhurried, the kind of place that has witnessed decades of families arriving frazzled and leaving slightly less so.

Our first morning, determined to stock the kitchen with something beyond the emergency baguette and questionable cheese we'd grabbed at a service station, we set off for what Dave assured me was a nearby market. Twenty minutes of increasingly narrow lanes later, we stumbled upon something better. A tiny cave cooperative, unmarked on any map we'd brought, where a woman named Monique poured us tastings of local Cotes du Rhone Villages and explained, in spectacularly fast French that I pretended to follow, about the terroir. We left with three bottles and the profound realisation that getting lost here was less mishap and more methodology.

The pattern established itself quickly. Each day we'd set out with vague intentions - perhaps the Pont du Gard, perhaps somewhere for bouillabaisse - and each day we'd find ourselves somewhere else entirely. A limestone trail that wound through garrigue scrubland, where the smell of thyme and rosemary rose from underfoot like nature's own air freshener. A village bakery in a place I still cannot name, where the proprietor, spotting our confusion, simply handed us the best pain au chocolat I've ever tasted without requiring me to murder his language first.

My favourite discovery came on our fourth afternoon. We'd meant to walk to the river, took a wrong turning at a field of sunflowers, and found ourselves in a hollow between hills where someone had placed a single stone bench facing nothing more dramatic than a dry riverbed and a copse of oak trees. We sat for an hour. Dave dozed. I watched a lizard perform elaborate push-ups on a nearby rock. It was, in its complete unremarkableness, absolutely perfect.

I should mention the cicadas. Nobody had prepared me for the cicadas. The first evening, convinced some mechanical catastrophe had befallen the neighbourhood, I actually went outside to investigate. The drone rose from every tree, every bush, every blade of stubborn grass, a collective insect symphony that made conversation briefly impossible and then, once accepted, weirdly companionable. We ate dinner on the terrace shouting pleasantries at each other like elderly relatives at a wedding, and I have rarely been happier.

The mishaps continued, of course. There was the incident with the outdoor shower and an unexpectedly chilly morning. The time I confidently ordered what I believed was chicken and received something that had definitely once had tentacles. Dave's ongoing feud with the pool's cleaning robot, which he named Gerald and accused of deliberate sabotage. Each small disaster became, in retelling, part of the place's peculiar charm.

What I understood gradually, perhaps too gradually for someone who prides herself on organisation, was that Rochefort-du-Gard and its surroundings resist planning. The landscape of low hills and hidden valleys, of vineyards and olive groves and sudden, surprising villages, rewards the wanderer and mildly punishes the itinerary-obsessed. I arrived with printed schedules and left with sunburn, slightly ruined shoes, and a collection of unplanned moments I suspect I will value far longer.

On our final morning, Dave suggested one last drive. No destination, he promised, which I correctly interpreted as absolutely no destination whatsoever. We found a track leading past a ruined borie, one of those curious dry-stone huts the shepherds once used, and followed it until the car could follow no further. We walked another ten minutes through scratchy undergrowth and emerged onto a ridge looking south across a valley thick with morning mist. Somewhere below, invisible, a dog barked. A church bell counted the hour, though from which village we could not say.

We stood there until the sun burned the mist away and the ordinary world reasserted itself. Then we turned around, found the car eventually, and drove back to pack. I have no photograph of that view. I am rather glad. Some things belong properly to memory, slightly unreliable, slightly improved by time, genuinely and uncomplicatedly ours.

The sat-nav, I should add, remained unrepentant to the last, attempting one final vineyard shortcut as we departed for the airport. Dave, to his credit, did not follow it. Progress, of a sort.