I have never been a natural at reading maps, and my phone's GPS deciding to quit precisely as we left Kalamata Airport was, in hindsight, rather predictable. There I was, behind the wheel of a hire car that felt roughly the size of a small bus, crawling along a road flanked by olive groves that stretched out like a green and silver sea. My wife Sarah was navigating using a screenshot she had taken three days earlier, which she kept zooming in on until it became a meaningless blur of pixels. The children, meanwhile, had begun a competitive game of who could spot the most goats. Freddie, who is eight, was winning by some margin because he kept pointing at rocks and claiming they were sleeping goats, and nobody had the energy to argue.

The mishap came when we reached what I confidently declared was our turning. It was not our turning. It was, in fact, the driveway of an extremely patient man who was in the process of loading crates of oranges onto a lorry. I attempted a three-point turn that became a seven-point turn, during which I may have reversed slightly into a bush that was absolutely not there a moment ago. The orange man watched this performance with the kind of amused resignation that suggested he had seen worse. He waved us back toward the main road with a gesture that managed to be both helpful and faintly pitying.

When we finally found the right track, bumping along past more olive trees and the occasional lemon tree heavy with fruit, I felt that particular relief that comes at the end of any journey involving children, luggage, and my own questionable sense of direction. And then the house appeared, tucked into the hillside with a view down toward the Messenian Gulf that made every wrong turn worth it.

The villa sat low and white against the terracotta earth, with a covered terrace that immediately suggested long lunches and the kind of afternoon naps I had not enjoyed since before fatherhood. Sarah went straight for the pool, dipping her hand in and declaring it perfect with the satisfied tone of someone who had done all the booking research and was now receiving her reward. The children, naturally, had already found the outdoor shower and were taking turns standing under it fully clothed.

Inside, the place had that particular smell of somewhere properly lived in during summer months - a little woody, a little of the sea coming through open windows, something faintly herbal from the surrounding hillside. The kitchen opened straight onto the terrace, which I knew immediately would mean me making endless trips back and forth with plates of tomatoes and cheese and whatever else we assembled from the shops in nearby Verga. The sitting area had comfortable-looking sofas that had clearly absorbed years of post-swim relaxation, and I found myself already calculating which corner would be mine for evening reading.

I must confess to a small moment of self-reflection as I stood there with a still-damp shirt from the journey, watching my family already settling into their various territories around the place. I am not always good at slowing down. The wrong turn, the bush, the orange man - these things had wound me tight in that particular way that driving in unfamiliar places always does. But standing on that terrace, with the afternoon light beginning to soften and the distant sound of a dog barking somewhere down the valley, I felt something unclench. The children were laughing about something. Sarah was unpacking with the efficient contentment that means she is already on holiday proper. I had absolutely nothing to do except figure out what to cook for dinner, and even that felt like a pleasure rather than a task.

We ate that first evening on the terrace, a simple assembly of bread and olives and local cheese that tasted of somewhere specific. The children were too tired for their usual bickering. Sarah and I shared a bottle of wine and watched the last light fade over the sea. Somewhere in the darkness below, a village was settling into evening, and I could hear the distant clatter of plates and voices that meant other people were doing much the same as us. I thought about the orange man, and hoped his lorry had been loaded, and that he too was having a quiet evening. Then Freddie fell asleep at the table with his head on his arms, and we carried him off to bed, and I knew already that this was going to be the kind of holiday I would try too hard to remember and probably never quite capture again, except in moments like this one.