I have never been so relieved to see a man holding a goat as I was when we finally found our way to the little stone cottage in Agia Galini. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The journey from Heraklion had started well enough. My partner Dave had insisted on hiring a car, which in theory meant freedom and adventure. In practice it meant Dave navigating with the confidence of a man who once found his way out of Ikea in Croydon, and me in the passenger seat watching the Cretan hills grow more dramatic and our petrol gauge grow more concerning. We had been warned the final stretch involved something the rental chap described as "a road, sort of." What he failed to mention was that this road appeared to have been designed by someone who fundamentally disagreed with the concept of straight lines.

We missed the turning twice. The first time we ended up at a taverna where an elderly gentleman with eyebrows like abandoned bird nests simply shook his head and said "English?" in a tone that suggested he had seen our type before. The second time we found ourselves in someone's olive grove, where a woman named Eleni was hanging laundry and found our predicament so amusing she called her husband to come and witness it. He arrived with two coffees and no hurry whatsoever, and we spent twenty minutes discussing the relative merits of Cretan olive oil versus the "suspicious liquid" they sell in supermarkets back home. We never did establish whose husband he was, as Eleni kept referring to him as "this one" with theatrical eye-rolls.

By the time we spotted the goat man, we had been driving in what I can only describe as an increasingly intimate relationship with the landscape. The goat man turned out to be Stavros, the property caretaker, who was not in fact holding a goat but was being enthusiastically investigated by one. He had the weathered patience of someone who had spent decades waiting for English people to arrive in inappropriate vehicles, and he led us down the final track with the goat trotting behind like an unpaid assistant.

The cottage itself was perched on the hillside with the sort of view that makes you immediately forget you were recently lost and slightly desperate. Whitewashed walls, terracotta roof, the whole charming package. But Stavros was in no rush to hand over keys. He wanted to know about our flight, our jobs, whether Dave's mother knew he drove like this. He produced figs from his pocket and insisted we eat them while he explained the boiler, the bins, and the neighbour's rooster who he described as "a liar" because it crowed at midnight, noon, and apparently whenever it felt dramatic.

We met the rooster's owner the next morning. Maria appeared at our gate with a bowl of tomatoes and a thorough interrogation about our marital status, which she seemed to find unsatisfactorily vague. She had lived in the village her entire life, she told us, apart from one regrettable year in Athens where people "do not know their own cousins." She gave us detailed instructions for the beach, most of which involved avoiding specific sun loungers belonging to people she did not care for.

By evening we had accumulated a small collection of local characters without really trying. The baker who opened late because "the dough was thinking." The teenager at the mini market who practiced English slang he had clearly learned from questionable internet sources. The old man at the harbour who claimed to have been a sponge diver, a poet, and briefly involved in something he would only describe as "the cheese incident."

What struck me most was how none of them treated us like tourists exactly. More like distant relatives who had finally bothered to visit, slightly disappointing but worth feeding. There was no performance, no rush, just the slow unfolding of genuine curiosity in both directions. I found myself telling Maria about my actual mother, not the polished holiday version. Dave admitted to Stavros that he found driving abroad genuinely terrifying. These small confessions felt strangely earned, exchanged for tomatoes and figs and the shared experience of that ridiculous road.

I had arrived in Agia Galini expecting sunshine and relaxation, which I certainly found. But what stays with me is the particular quality of attention these people offered. Not the curated friendliness of service, but something more rooted and specific, full of opinions and gentle mockery and unexpected pockets of wisdom delivered alongside practical advice about bin collection.

We left the car at the cottage on our final day and walked down to the village for coffee. Stavros waved from his garden. Maria shouted something about our shoes. The teenager at the mini market had prepared a new slang phrase, which he delivered with such pride that we did not have the heart to explain its probable origins.

I still think about that road sometimes, and the goat, and the way Eleni laughed. I think about how lost we were, and how completely we were found.