I have never been a natural at reading maps, which is a polite way of saying I once got lost in a multi-storey car park in Milton Keynes. So when my partner handed me the directions to our holiday cottage in Koroni, Peloponnese, I should have suspected trouble was brewing.

The flight to Kalamata was straightforward enough, and the hire car even had working air conditioning, which felt like winning the lottery in late July. We had the kids in the back, a boot full of suitcases and enough snacks to survive a minor siege. The plan was simple: follow the coast road south, look for the turning near the olive groves, arrive in time for a sunset swim. What actually happened was that I took the wrong turning near an olive grove, then another wrong turning near a different olive grove, and before long we were on a dirt track that grew narrower and more apologetic with every metre.

"Are we nearly there?" asked my youngest, for the fourteenth time.

"We are having an adventure," I replied, which is parent code for I have absolutely no idea where we are.

The track ended at a small stone chapel with a cat asleep on the step. I got out to turn the car around and managed to reverse into a ditch. Not dramatically. Just enough that the back wheel spun uselessly and my partner gave me that particular look she has perfected over fifteen years of marriage. The look that says I love you but also how have you survived this long.

A man appeared from nowhere, as they do in Greece, and helped us push the car free with the relaxed efficiency of someone who has rescued many foolish tourists. He spoke no English, I spoke no Greek beyond please and thank you, but we bonded over shared grunting and the universal language of pointing at wheels. I gave him the bag of biscuits intended for the children. He seemed pleased. The children were not.

By the time we found the actual turning, the sun had set and we were running on pure stubbornness. Then we turned the final corner and there it was, the cottage sitting above the bay with its lights on, looking like something from a film set. The pool glimmered in the darkness. The olive trees rustled in the warm breeze. My daughter said "wow" without irony, which for a teenager is the highest possible praise.

The key was in the lockbox exactly where the instructions said, though by that point I half expected a treasure hunt. We tumbled inside, dropped bags in random corners, and I opened the terrace doors to prove we had actually made it. The night air smelled of jasmine and distant sea salt. Somewhere below, waves were doing their eternal, patient work against the shore.

I stood there with a warm beer from the fridge, watching moths dance around the outside light, and felt something shift. The journey had been ridiculous. I had reversed into a ditch and bribed a stranger with custard creams. But we were here, in this stone cottage with its terracotta floors and wooden shutters, with a week stretching ahead of us like an unwritten postcard.

The next morning I woke to my son already in the pool at half past seven, my daughter reading on a sun lounger with actual printed pages, and my partner making coffee in the small kitchen with the satisfied hum of someone who knew she had chosen well. I made toast and burned it slightly, because the grill had its own personality, and ate it on the terrace watching fishing boats putter across the bay.

That first full day we did almost nothing, which was the entire point. We swam, we read, we argued mildly about whose turn it was to walk to the village for bread. The cottage had that particular quality of old stone buildings in hot climates, where the interior stays deliciously cool even when the terrace tiles burn your bare feet. We napped through the afternoon heat like sensible Mediterranean people, something we never manage at home in Reading.

I kept thinking about that wrong turning, the chapel cat, the ditch. The holiday had started with me being thoroughly myself, which is to say slightly incompetent and overly optimistic about my navigation skills. Yet here we were, and the mishap had already become something we laughed about, a story we would tell back home with embellishments.

Koroni revealed itself slowly, as places do when you stop trying to rush. The harbour with its fortress walls, the narrow streets where old men sat outside cafes watching the world with professional patience, the small beaches where we spent hours doing very little with great concentration. We bought tomatoes that actually tasted of something and ate them with olive oil and salt on the terrace, watching the light change over the Messenian Gulf.

By the third day I had stopped checking my phone. By the fifth I had read two entire books, something that had not happened since before the children were born. The cottage became our rhythm, our little kingdom of slow mornings and late dinners and the particular pleasure of doing simple things badly together.

On our final evening I burned the toast again, deliberately this time, because it had become tradition. We sat on the terrace as the sky turned that impossible Greek orange, and my daughter asked if we could come back next year. I said we would see, which is parent code for I am already looking at the calendar.

Driving back to Kalamata, I took exactly the same wrong turning near exactly the same olive grove, because some things never change. But this time I knew how to find my way back, and that felt like progress of a sort.