I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong villa. There I was, standing on a sun-baked driveway in Skroponeria, jiggling a key in a door that absolutely refused to budge, while a very patient Greek cat watched me with what I can only describe as theatrical pity. Turns out I was one house down. The actual villa, a lovely stone place with a pool that shimmered like a promise, sat waiting twenty metres away. My wife found this hilarious. I laughed too, eventually, once I'd stopped sweating through my shirt.

The drive from Athens had already set the tone. We took a wrong turn after Chalkida, following a road that grew narrower and more optimistic by the kilometre. What began as a shortcut became an accidental adventure through olive groves so ancient they probably remember Aristotle. The tarmac gave up entirely at one point, surrendering to a dirt track that wound between cypress trees and the occasional startled goat. My hire car, a cheerful little Fiat that had clearly never signed up for this, protested every bump with a new and exciting rattle.

But here's the thing about getting properly lost in Greece Mainland: you stumble upon things no guidebook bothers with. We found a tiny chapel perched above a cove, its whitewash glowing against rust-red rock. No signpost, no coach park, just a gate held closed with baling twine and a handwritten note asking visitors to light a candle. We did, partly from respect, partly because the silence in there felt like something you shouldn't disturb without offering something back. A local woman appeared from nowhere with cherries she'd picked that morning, insisting we take them. We ate them on the bonnet of the car, spitting stones into the scrub and feeling absurdly pleased with ourselves.

The villa itself sat on a hillside above the Evian Gulf, positioned for maximum smugness. My first impression, once I'd found the actual building, was how completely it vanished into the landscape. From the pool terrace, you could watch fishing boats drift past like they had nowhere particular to be. The air smelled of pine and something herbal I couldn't identify. Wild oregano, probably, though at the time I convinced myself it was something more mysterious. Travel does this to you. Ordinary things become portentous.

That evening, determined to compound our earlier navigational success, we set out for what the map suggested was a taverna. We found instead a village square where an old man played backgammon alone, moving both sets of pieces with the concentration of a chess grandmaster. He directed us, via elaborate gestures and approximately three words of shared language, to a place down a lane that didn't appear on any map we had. The food was simple and ridiculous: grilled fish caught that morning, tomatoes that actually tasted of something, bread still warm. The owner refused to give us a bill, instead accepting whatever we pressed into his hand with a shrug that suggested we were all making this up as we went along.

I keep thinking about that wrong turn now I'm home. The villa with its wrong-door twin, the chapel with its cherries, the backgammon player and his solitary game. There's something about Greece Mainland that rewards the poorly prepared, the easily distracted, the people who read maps upside down. You arrive thinking you'll see the sights, tick the boxes, return with organised memories. Instead you find yourself somewhere you didn't mean to be, eating fish you can't name, talking to people you can't properly understand, and realising this was exactly what you needed. The mishaps aren't interruptions to the holiday. They are the holiday.

I still don't know what that herb was. Probably just oregano. Probably something better left unidentified, so I can keep wondering.