I have never been so grateful to see a swimming pool in my entire life, and that includes the time I fell into a canal in Amsterdam. The journey to Finikia Heraklio had been one of those travel experiences that starts badly and somehow finds new and creative ways to get worse, like a Greek tragedy but with more sweat and a broken sat nav.

It began at Heraklion Airport, where I confidently marched to the wrong car hire desk and spent twenty minutes arguing about a booking that did not exist. Turns out I had booked with a company whose desk was in a completely different terminal. By the time I found the right one, my luggage was doing laps on the carousel and I had to perform an undignified sprint through arrivals, nearly taking out a family with an enormous inflatable flamingo.

The drive itself should have been straightforward. Twenty minutes, the booking confirmation said. Easy. Except my phone decided this was the perfect moment to update its operating system, leaving me with no maps and a printed set of directions that I had somehow managed to spill coffee across. I drove in what I can only describe as an optimistic spiral around the outskirts of Heraklion, passing the same petrol station three times. A local man on a scooter eventually took pity on me, gesturing wildly for me to follow him through a maze of narrow lanes that seemed to get progressively more narrow and more lane-like until I was practically driving through someone's olive grove.

Then came the mishap that still makes me wince. I finally spotted the property, this lovely stone villa with its traditional Cretan architecture and those beautiful wooden shutters, and in my relief I completely misjudged the width of the entrance. There was a horrible scraping sound. I had wedged the hire car between two stone pillars with about two inches to spare on either side. I sat there, engine running, wondering if I could simply live in the car now. It was not even my car. I had paid extra for the insurance, a fact I thanked every deity I could name.

A woman from the neighbouring property appeared, presumably drawn by the sound of my dignity shattering. She spoke no English, I spoke no Greek, but through an elaborate system of gestures and facial expressions she managed to guide me out of my stone prison. I emerged sweating, trembling, and making mental notes to never drive abroad again.

But then I actually stepped inside Finikia Heraklio, and something shifted. The chaos of the journey fell away like it belonged to someone else. The villa has this wonderful coolness to it, thick stone walls doing their job against the Cretan heat. I dumped my bags in the hallway and walked straight through to the terrace, and there it was. That pool. Beyond it, olive groves stretching towards distant hills, the kind of view that makes you forget you ever owned a functioning sat nav.

I stood there in my still-sweaty travel clothes, clutching a warm bottle of water, and laughed. Properly laughed, the kind that comes from somewhere deep when you realise how ridiculous you have been and how little it matters now. The scraping sound on the car, the spiral around Heraklion, the inflatable flamingo incident. All of it had delivered me here, to this quiet terrace with its wooden furniture and its bougainvillea climbing the walls, to the smell of herbs from the garden and the distant clinking of goat bells.

I did not even unpack properly. I found the nearest taverna within walking distance, still slightly dazed, and ate the best dakos I have ever tasted, the barley rusk soaked in tomato and olive oil, topped with that crumbly local cheese. The owner asked if I was staying at the Finikia place. I admitted I was. He nodded approvingly, as if this explained my slightly wild appearance, and brought me a glass of raki on the house. It burned going down and I loved every second.

That first evening, I sat by the pool as the light changed, watching the hills turn golden and then purple. A gecko appeared on the wall, regarding me with what I chose to interpret as sympathy. I had arrived a complete disaster, a sweaty scraper of hire cars, a loser of digital maps. But Crete, it seemed, was not interested in my incompetence. It had already moved on, offering me this instead. Quiet, warmth, the promise of days doing very little in a very beautiful place.

I went to bed early, in a bedroom with wooden beams and crisp white sheets, and slept like I had been dropped from a great height. The last thing I remember thinking was that sometimes the worst arrivals make the best stories, though I would definitely be checking the car in daylight and possibly inventing a different explanation for the scratches.