I have never been so grateful for a sat-nav in my entire life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving vehicle quite so much either. The journey to our little stone cottage in Ypati should have taken three and a half hours from Athens airport. It took five, two wrong turns, and one spectacular argument about whether I could, in fact, read a map. I could not, as it turned out. The sat-nav decided that a dirt track through an olive grove was definitely a road. It was not a road. It was a suggestion. A Greek suggestion, which apparently means something entirely different.

We arrived at the cottage with dust on every window, my dignity in tatters, and a rental car that now made a concerning grinding noise. But then I stepped out onto the terrace, and honestly, I forgot my own name for a moment. The garden was ridiculous. Not ridiculous in a manicured, Chelsea Flower Show sort of way. Ridiculous in that wild, Mediterranean, "we just grow things here and they become beautiful" sort of way. Lemon trees heavy with fruit. Geraniums spilling out of terracotta pots. A vine somewhere overhead that I later learned was grapes, actual grapes, just hanging there like it was nothing.

The cottage itself was small and stone-walled and stubbornly refusing to be modern in any way that mattered. The shutters creaked. The key was enormous, like something from a castle. There was a fireplace I immediately knew we would not use because it was thirty degrees, but I liked knowing it existed. It felt serious. Permanent. A fireplace for proper winters, for people who actually live here and do not just pass through with their ridiculous sat-nav stories.

I had brought four books with me, which my partner found excessive for a week. I found it optimistic. I read one and a half. The rest of the time I spent doing what I can only describe as "garden tourism," which is where you move from one chair to another and judge the light. Morning chair by the lemon tree, excellent for coffee and watching a local cat judge my life choices. Midday chair under the vine, necessary because the sun here does not mess about. Afternoon chair by the little stone wall, perfect for that specific drowsiness where you are not quite asleep but you are definitely not functioning.

We did walk into Ypati itself one morning, a slow twenty-minute stroll that became forty because I kept stopping to look at things. A wall. A cat. A particularly excellent shadow. The town is small and unhurried and full of Greeks doing ordinary Greek things, which I found embarrassingly fascinating. Someone was sweeping their doorstep with tremendous seriousness. An old man sat outside a kafeneio with a coffee he had clearly been nursing for an hour. I wanted to ask him his secrets. I did not, because my Greek extends to "hello," "thank you," and accidentally ordering three beers when I meant one.

By day three I had stopped checking my phone. Not in a smug, digital-detox way. More in a "I genuinely forgot where I put it" way. It was in my bag, dead, and I did not charge it for another two days. What would I have done with it? Posted a photo of my chair? My half-read book? The cat, who by now had accepted me as a kind of disappointing furniture?

I have spent holidays before where I felt I should be doing things. Museums. Hikes. That one boat trip everyone recommends. This was not that holiday. This was the holiday where I learned that doing very little is, in fact, doing something. It is just something that does not photograph well or impress anyone at dinner parties. The grinding noise in the car eventually stopped, by the way. Or maybe I stopped noticing it. Same thing, really, when you are sitting under a grape vine with no particular place to be.

On our last morning, I woke early and made coffee and sat in all three chairs before nine o'clock, like some kind of efficiency maniac. The cat watched. The lemons hung there, being lemons. I thought about how I would describe this to people back home, and realised I would not bother. Some things you just have to grind along a dirt track to understand.