I have never been so pleased to see a lemon tree in all my life. Three hours after leaving Athens, one wrong turn outside Kranidi, and a spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted our holiday home was somewhere in the middle of the Argolic Gulf, we finally crunched up the gravel drive of our Ermioni villa. I was sweaty, slightly carsick, and clutching a carrier bag of melted koulourakia from a petrol station that had seemed like a good idea at the time.

The mishap, because there is always one with us, happened approximately forty minutes earlier. Convinced I knew a shortcut, I had directed my partner down what Google Maps optimistically called a "road." It was, in fact, a goat track with ambitions. We bottomed out the hire car twice, scattered an entire flock of something woolly, and arrived at a dead end overlooking a cove so beautiful it would have been romantic had I not been swearing quite so inventively. Reversing back up took twenty minutes and most of my dignity. My partner sat in silence, which was worse than shouting.

So when that lemon tree appeared, heavy with fruit and buzzing with bees, I nearly wept. The villa sat above it, all whitewashed walls and terracotta roof tiles, looking thoroughly unbothered by our chaos. A local cat watched from the wall with the expression of someone who had seen this exact scene many times before.

The key was in a lockbox, which sounds simple enough. It was not. The instructions mentioned a "small blue pot near the bougainvillea." There were three bougainvilleas, seventeen pots, and nothing remotely blue in the fading light. I tried four combinations before realising I had been reading the wrong booking reference entirely. The correct one was in my partner's email, which she read aloud with the careful patience of someone addressing a very stupid child.

The door opened onto cool tile and the smell of jasmine from somewhere just outside. I stood there with my melted biscuits and my goat-track trauma and simply breathed. The sitting room was simple, properly Greek, with wooden beams and furniture that looked like it had stories to tell. Through the French doors, the pool glimmered with that particular blue that makes you want to drop everything and get in fully clothed.

I did not, because I am supposedly an adult. Instead I explored, still slightly manic from the drive. The kitchen had everything needed for actual cooking, which immediately made me feel guilty about my intentions to live entirely on souvlaki and supermarket wine. The bedrooms were cool and white, the kind of simplicity that takes effort to achieve. Ours had shutters that opened onto olive groves and, distantly, the sea.

My partner found the outdoor kitchen first, a proper stone-built affair with a grill that looked like it had handled many summer evenings. She raised an eyebrow in my direction. "Shortcut," she said, and that was that, forgiveness offered in the form of a challenge to master that grill before the week was out.

By the time we dragged our cases upstairs, the sun had properly set and the cicadas had started their nightly opera. We sat by the pool with the emergency wine we had bought in Kranidi, too tired to swim, too wired to sleep. The melted koulourakia, it turned out, were not bad with wine. Nothing is, really, when you have finally stopped moving.

I thought about that goat track as the stars came out, thick and unfamiliar above us. The wrong turn had cost us time and some paint off the car's underside. But it had also given us a cove we would never have found otherwise, and a story we would tell with increasing embellishment for years. The villa, when we finally reached it, felt earned rather than simply arrived at. That lemon tree, those tiles, that cat still watching from the wall, they were the reward for perseverance and for accepting that sometimes the scenic route chooses you.

Tomorrow I would master the lockbox without drama. I would find the proper bakery in Ermioni port, swim before breakfast, and work out how the outdoor grill functioned. Tonight, though, I sat with my warm wine and my slightly sicky biscuits and felt absolutely, perfectly, where I was meant to be.