I have never been more grateful for a sat nav's patience than on the drive down to Bormes-les-Mimosas. Three hours from Nice, or so the internet promised, and I was determined to do it in two and a half. French motorways, sunshine, a hire car with that new-plastic smell - what could possibly go wrong? The answer, as it turned out, was a roundabout near Toulon and my own spectacular inability to read a sign while also changing lanes. I did two full circuits, growing increasingly frantic, before accidentally taking the exit for a hypermarket and finding myself in a car park surrounded by people who definitely knew where they were going. A man in a beret watched me reverse with the expression of someone witnessing a dog attempt algebra.

By the time I reached the villa, perched on the hillside above the old town, I had aged approximately fifteen years. The key was in a lockbox, which I attacked with the desperation of a burglar on his first job. The code worked on the fourth attempt. I fell through the door with my suitcase, a baguette I had panic-bought at the hypermarket, and the certain knowledge that everyone in a three-mile radius now knew my name was Michael and I was not coping well.

The terrace saved me. It always does in Provence. I stood there with my sorry baguette and watched the light do that impossible golden thing it does in late afternoon, the sea flickering in the distance like someone was polishing it. The villa had a pool I had no energy to use, terracotta tiles warm underfoot, and the particular hush of a place that has seen many arrivals and politely decided not to comment.

I ventured out for dinner because the hypermarket baguette was not going to cut it. The old town of Bormes-les-Mimosas climbs the hill in a tangle of cobbled lanes and pastel houses, every corner a postcard waiting to happen. I found a small restaurant with three tables outside and a chalkboard menu I could barely decipher. The owner, a woman in her sixties with the bearing of someone who had never once done two circuits of a roundabout, looked me up and down and asked if I was lost. I admitted I had been, extensively. She softened slightly and brought me a glass of rose without my ordering it. "For the shock," she said, though her expression suggested the shock was hers.

The food was simple and perfect - grilled fish, vegetables that tasted of actual sunlight, bread that made my hypermarket purchase weep with inadequacy. I ate slowly, eavesdropping on a nearby table where two elderly men were having what sounded like the same argument they had been having since 1987. Something about boules. Something about a disputed point in a game played decades ago. Their voices rose and fell with the rhythm of old friends who have long since forgotten what winning would even mean.

Walking back through the darkened lanes, I passed a man watering his window boxes at eleven at night. He nodded as if this were the most natural hour for horticulture. I nodded back, too tired to question it. The villa waited on its hillside, the pool shimmering with borrowed moonlight, the whole of Provence spread out below like an offer I had not yet earned but was being given anyway.

That first night I slept with the shutters open and woke to birdsong and the distant clatter of someone else's breakfast preparations. The sat nav sat silent on the bedside table, judgmental or forgiving, I could not tell. I made coffee in the small kitchen, carried it to the terrace, and watched the morning light climb slowly up the old town opposite. Somewhere down there, I knew, the boules argument continued, the window boxes were being attended to at improbable hours, and life was proceeding with the unhurried confidence of people who had never needed to prove anything to a roundabout.

I thought about my arrival, the hypermarket, the lockbox fiasco. Then I thought about the fish, the rose, the man and his nocturnal watering can. Travel, I decided, reaching for more coffee, is mostly just showing up slightly broken and letting strangers decide what to do with you. So far, Bormes-les-Mimosas seemed to be managing just fine.