I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I put "Le Touquet" into my sat nav and it tried to send me to a golf course in Kent. Three hours into what should have been a straightforward drive from London, I found myself in a petrol station near Boulogne, holding my phone at arm's length like a compass, while a very patient Frenchman explained that I had in fact driven past my turning roughly forty minutes ago. My French extends to ordering wine and apologising, so I did both.

The villa itself, when I finally found it, was tucked down a sandy lane that looked more like a footpath than anything meant for a Vauxhall Corsa. I abandoned the car at what felt like a respectful distance and walked the rest, half-convinced I was trespassing on someone's private pine forest. Then the trees opened up and there it was: a proper wooden chalet with a steep roof and a terrace that seemed to sag slightly under the weight of its own charm. I fell in love before I even found the keys, which the owner had left in a fake rock that I initially kicked across the garden thinking it was a real rock.

That first evening, determined to find food, I set off on foot and promptly got lost. The map on my phone had given up the ghost somewhere around the Channel Tunnel, so I wandered down lanes that grew progressively narrower and more sandy until I stumbled into what I can only describe as someone's back garden that had evolved into a restaurant. Tables under string lights, a grill smoking away, and a man in an apron who didn't seem remotely surprised to see a dishevelled Englishman emerge from the pines. I ate the best mussels of my life there, sat between a French family arguing about football and a Dutch couple who kept trying to share their wine with me. I never did learn the name of the place. I couldn't find it again the next day if you paid me.

The following morning I attempted a straightforward walk to the beach and ended up in a nature reserve, ankle-deep in marshland, watching herons lift off from reeds that stretched for miles. A local cyclist found me there, standing very still as if this might somehow make me invisible, and directed me through a gap in the dunes to a stretch of sand so empty it felt like a private showing. I spent the afternoon there with a baguette that had gone slightly hard in my rucksack, watching kite surfers carve up the horizon.

Later that week I took a wrong turn on a bike hire and found myself in a village that seemed to exist purely for the purpose of selling cheese and resentment towards Parisians. The fromagerie had been run by the same family since before the war, or so I was told in extensive detail by the current proprietor, who seemed grateful for any audience. I left with a wheel of something pungent and a story about his grandfather's bicycle that I only half understood.

What struck me most about Le Touquet, once I stopped trying to navigate it properly, was how much it rewards the aimless. The formal attractions are pleasant enough, but the real character lives in these accidental discoveries: the marsh paths that dead-end at hidden cabins, the beach bars that appear only at certain tides, the locals who treat your incompetence with amused kindness rather than irritation. I arrived thinking I would tick off sights and instead spent a week collecting moments that refused to be replicated.

On my final evening I sat on that sagging terrace with the last of the cheese and a bottle of local beer, listening to the pine trees creak in the wind. My car remained parked at its respectful distance, coated in sand, probably home to several families of spider by now. I thought about how rigidly I plan my normal life, how every journey mapped to the minute, and how completely lost I had been for most of this holiday, and how little it had mattered. There is something humbling about realising that your best experiences come from your own incompetence.

I drove home the long way, deliberately, and got lost twice more before I even reached the motorway.