I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when my sat-nav decided Valreas was somewhere near Lyon rather than in the Vaucluse. Three hours of cheerful French motorways later, I found myself in a industrial estate outside Saint-Etienne, wondering why a Provencal village looked suspiciously like a Renault factory. Turns out I'd punched in "Valreas" but the device had other ideas. A muttered apology to my passenger, a U-turn that would have made a taxi driver wince, and we were off again, now properly southward toward the real Rhone-Alpes border country.

The approach to Valreas itself, when it finally came, was the sort of accidental magic that no guidebook manufactures. We'd taken a wrong turn avoiding roadworks near Nyons, bouncing down a narrow lane between fields of lavender that weren't supposed to be on any route I'd planned. The scent drifted through open windows, and my companion, who had been threatening mutiny since Saint-Etienne, actually smiled. We emerged from this unplanned detour onto a ridge, and there below sat Valreas, its medieval walls catching the late afternoon light like something from a particularly optimistic postcard.

The property, when we found it tucked down a quiet lane just outside the old town, announced itself with a wrought-iron gate that required a wrestling match and some creative language. I may have uttered something unprintable about French engineering, at which point an elderly neighbour appeared from nowhere, wordlessly produced a key, and demonstrated the exact angle of lift required. She disappeared without a word, leaving me feeling like the hapless English tourist I absolutely am.

Inside, the place smelled of stone and old wood and something faintly herby. The kitchen opened onto a terrace where grapevines had been left to do their own thing, creating a green tunnel that led to a small pool. I stood there with a cup of tea that I shouldn't have been drinking at that hour, watching swallows dart about, and felt that particular shift that happens when a holiday actually begins. The mishaps, the wrong turns, the sat-nav betrayal - they had deposited me somewhere I couldn't have found on purpose.

That evening, we wandered into Valreas proper without any plan beyond finding bread. The old town, still partly enclosed by its fourteenth-century walls, revealed itself in fragments. A narrow passage between houses opened suddenly onto a small square where teenagers kicked a football against ancient stone. Another turn, made randomly because a cat looked interesting, brought us to a wine cooperative where a woman was locking up but paused to explain, in patient French that made me feel both stupid and grateful, that the local Cotes du Rhone Villages was worth the morning visit.

We got properly lost after that, which is how we found the bakery we returned to every subsequent morning, and the bar where the owner pretended not to understand my order until I improved my pronunciation sufficiently to earn my beer. Each wrong turn in those winding streets delivered something the main thoroughfares withheld: a hidden garden visible through a gate left ajar, a workshop where an old man was restoring furniture with tools that looked older than him, a mural painted on the side of a house that no one had bothered to mention in any tourism literature I later consulted.

The lesson, which I resisted learning because I am a planner by nature and a control enthusiast by temperament, was that the scheduled highlights would never match what we stumbled upon. The chateaux and the organised tastings had their place, but the moment that stays with me happened on an unnamed path behind the property, where I'd gone to investigate a noise and found myself in an olive grove watching a farmer beat his harvest onto cloths spread beneath the trees. He waved me over, offered something unidentifiable from his pocket that turned out to be dried fig, and we stood in silence that needed no translation.

I came back from that lane different from how I left, though I couldn't say exactly how. Something about permission, perhaps. The permission to be lost, to be ridiculous with a sat-nav, to follow a cat down an alley and trust that bread and beauty would find you. The property became a base for this happy wandering, its vine-covered terrace the place where each evening we compared notes on what we'd discovered by accident, laughing at our own surprise that getting lost had turned out better than getting it right.

On the final morning, I stood again with that illicit cup of tea, watching mist rise from fields I couldn't name toward hills I hadn't intended to see. The neighbour's cat appeared, the same one that had led us astray that first evening, and I followed it once more down the lane, knowing now that lost was exactly where I wanted to be.