The sat-nav gave up on us somewhere past Aix-en-Provence, which should have been my first clue that this holiday would not go according to plan. I'd been smug about downloading the offline maps, of course, but what I hadn't accounted for was my own spectacular ability to misread them. We turned left where we should have turned right, ended up down a lane barely wide enough for a bicycle, and found ourselves staring at a very confused farmer who was trying to herd goats around our hire car. I wound down the window, attempted my best schoolboy French, and apparently asked him something deeply personal about his sister. He just pointed back the way we'd come, shaking his head with the weary patience of someone who'd seen this exact scene a hundred times before.

By the time we actually found Venelles, I'd worked up a proper sweat and a healthy sense of humiliation. But then we turned onto the property's gravel drive, and something shifted. The house sat there like it had been waiting for us to stop being idiots and simply arrive. A low stone building with that particular dusty rose colour you only seem to get in Provence, shutters flung open to the afternoon light, and a terrace that looked out over olive trees stretching towards the Luberon hills. I stood there with my suitcase still in the car, suddenly aware that I'd been holding my breath.

The key was under a terracotta pot, which felt deliciously illicit. Inside, the place smelled of lavender and old wood, that heady combination that makes you want to immediately slow down. I found myself tiptoeing at first, as if the house were a museum rather than somewhere I'd paid to be. Ridiculous, really. My partner had to remind me that I was allowed to open the fridge.

We'd planned to unpack properly, maybe have a civilised drink on that terrace. Instead, within half an hour, we were wandering. The village of Venelles itself is small enough that you think you've seen it, then you turn a corner and there's another narrow street, another unexpected square with a fountain that someone's great-grandfather built. We got lost almost immediately, which became the pattern of the week. Deliberately lost, I should say, though the first time was genuine accident.

Following what looked like a path but was probably someone's private access to an olive grove, we stumbled upon a tiny chapel I'd never find again if you paid me. No signpost, no entry in any guidebook, just weathered stone and a wooden door that creaked like a horror film prop. Inside, someone had left fresh wildflowers in a jar. The silence was different there, thicker somehow, broken only by bees against the single window. I don't consider myself particularly spiritual, but I sat on the stone bench for a good ten minutes, feeling something unknot in my chest that I hadn't realised was tight.

The real discovery came three days in. We'd set out for what the map suggested was a marked walking route, got distracted by a bakery in a village whose name I never learned, and ended up on a dirt track that wound through vineyards. The grapes were just beginning to show, tiny hard clusters that the owner later told us would be ready by September. He found us standing at his fence like lost children, offered us a glass of something pink and local from a plastic jug, and spent twenty minutes explaining why this particular plot had been in his family since before the war. His dog, ancient and arthritic, leaned against my leg the entire time. I didn't plan any of it, couldn't have found it again with a compass and a prayer, and that was precisely the point.

By the end of the week, I'd stopped checking my phone for directions entirely. We found a swimming hole in a river that locals clearly knew about but tourists didn't, marked only by a few parked bicycles and the sound of teenagers shouting as they jumped from rocks. We ate bread and cheese on a wall we couldn't identify, watching the light turn golden across fields of sunflowers that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Each wrong turn became an invitation rather than a mistake.

On our final morning, I tried to find that chapel again. Failed completely, of course. Walked in circles for an hour before giving up and laughing at myself in the middle of an empty lane. The farmer with the goats would have recognised the expression. Some places, I've come to understand, aren't meant to be found twice. You simply have to trust that getting lost is its own kind of arrival.