Right, so picture this: I'm halfway down the M20, already imagining myself sprawled on some Vendee beach with a cold drink, when I realise I've left the house keys to our holiday rental on the kitchen table in Kent. Not the keys to our actual house, mind you. The keys they'd posted to us for the place in Saint Gilles Croix de Vie. Brilliant start, that. Had to turn round at Maidstone services, adding a solid two hours to an already ambitious drive, and arrived at the Eurotunnel in such a state that I tried to pay for a coffee with my Tesco Clubcard.

The ferry from Dieppe got us to Newhaven, then came the long haul south. By the time we crossed into Pays de la Loire, I'd convinced myself that Saint Gilles Croix de Vie was probably a myth, some elaborate French joke on gullible Brits. But there it was, eventually, a proper working port town with fishing boats bobbing about and that particular smell of salt and diesel that somehow feels like holiday proper.

We found our place down a narrow lane near the port, one of those traditional Vendee cottages with whitewashed walls and blue shutters that look impossibly charming until you try parking a Ford Focus anywhere near them. The neighbour, an elderly chap in gardening trousers, watched my three-point turn become a twelve-point turn with the kind of patient amusement the French have perfected. He eventually wandered over, lit a cigarette, and guided me in by millimetres while explaining, entirely in French and entirely to himself, why the English cannot drive.

The cottage itself was lovely, all wooden beams and creaky floors, but I'll be honest - we dumped our bags and immediately went wandering. This is where I should have consulted a map, or at least possessed any sense of direction whatsoever. My partner had popped into the boulangerie for bread, and I thought I'd "just have a quick explore" along the coastal path.

I found myself in what I can only describe as a maze of small lanes behind the port, each one narrower than the last, lined with fishermen's houses that all looked vaguely identical. Turned left at a cat that was definitely judging me. Right at a washing line of striped boat shirts. Left again at what I thought was a shortcut but was actually someone's courtyard, where a woman hanging laundry just nodded at me like unexpected Englishmen were a daily occurrence.

Somehow, and I genuinely cannot reconstruct how, I ended up at a tiny beach I'd never seen on any map. Not the main plage with its promenade and ice cream stands. This was a pocket of sand between two rocky outcrops, maybe fifty metres across, with a handful of weathered wooden boats pulled up and a single old boy fishing off the rocks in a cap that had seen better decades. No tourists. No signposts. Just the Atlantic rolling in and gulls arguing about something.

I sat on a rock for a good twenty minutes, properly lost and not remotely bothered. There's something about accidental discovery that planned excursions never match. I'd brought no phone, no water, no dignity. Just me and this hidden scrap of coastline that felt like it existed outside time, or at least outside Google Maps.

Eventually I retraced my steps using the sun, which is approximately the only navigation skill I possess, and found my partner back at the cottage, halfway through a baguette, entirely unsurprised that I'd vanished for an hour. "Find anything?" she asked. I tried to describe it and couldn't, not properly. That's the thing about getting lost - you bring back the feeling, not the photograph.

We spent the rest of the week deliberately losing ourselves. Woke early one morning and wandered inland without purpose, found a market in some village I still can't name, bought cheese from a woman who told us her goat's life story. Took a wrong turn on a cycle path and discovered a salt marsh with flamingos, actual flamingos, standing about like pink ornaments someone had forgotten to pack away.

The best meal we had wasn't at any recommended restaurant. It was a creperie we stumbled into because I needed the toilet, run by a Breton couple who'd retired south and argued cheerfully in the kitchen while making the most perfect galette complete I've ever tasted. We went back twice and never managed to find it again, which sounds like fiction but I swear is true.

Saint Gilles Croix de Vie itself is pleasant enough, the harbour proper with its restaurants and the bridge connecting the two halves of town. But my abiding memory is of those accidental corners, the places you find when you're not looking, when your phone's dead and your sense of direction's always been questionable. The Vendee coast has plenty of obvious charms, but its real magic hides in the gaps between the guidebook entries, waiting for the willingly lost.

I still don't know the name of that little beach. Part of me hopes I never find it again. Some places should stay accidental.