I'd set my heart on a proper Greek getaway, the sort where you do absolutely nothing and feel brilliant about it. So there I was, trundling down from Patras airport in a hire car that smelled faintly of air freshener and regret, navigating towards Lakkopetra in the northern Peloponnese. The sat nav had other ideas. Instead of the coastal road, it sent me up what I can only describe as a goat track with delusions of grandeur. My little Fiat scraped its undercarriage so many times I started naming the dents. By the time I spotted the sea glinting through the olive groves, I'd acquired a fine coating of dust and a newfound appreciation for tarmac.

The villa itself sat perched above a stretch of coastline I hadn't even known existed. Whitewashed walls, terracotta roof, that particular bone-dry smell of cypress and heat. I dumped my bags with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who'd just crossed the Sahara rather than driven forty-five minutes, and immediately locked myself out on the balcony. There I stood, phone inside, dignity crumbling, waving pathetically at a passing octogenarian who merely nodded and continued his donkey walk. Twenty minutes of creative problem-solving involving a broom handle and some very un-British language later, I was back indoors wondering if the holiday gods were testing me.

I hadn't planned to explore that first evening. The intention was supermarket wine and early bed. But hunger drove me out, and I took a wrong turn almost immediately. The road narrowed, climbed, deposited me in a village called something like Kato or Meto or possibly I'd just stopped being able to read Greek signs. Either way, there was a taverna with three tables and a chap grilling fish that had presumably been swimming that morning. No menu, just whatever Yorgos - he introduced himself with a handshake that could crush walnuts - decided you should eat. I ate grilled sardines, some kind of wild greens I'd never identify if you paid me, and bread that tasted of actual fire. The wine came in a metal jug. I was the only non-local and received the careful attention usually reserved for stray dogs that might bite.

The next morning, properly rested and determined to find the "proper" beach, I got lost again. This time spectacularly. A dirt track I mistook for a shortcut led me through orange groves heavy with fruit, past a shrine where someone had left a plastic doll and a lit candle, and finally to a cove where a single fishing boat was pulled up on pebbles. An old woman sat mending nets. She didn't look up. I swam in water so clear I could count my own toes, then lay on rocks like a lizard until the heat drove me back to the car.

By day three I'd abandoned any pretence of planning. The map stayed in the glovebox. I found a bakery in a town that doesn't appear on Google Maps, where the owner spoke no English and communicated entirely through pointing and generous samples of honey-drenched loukoumades. I stumbled upon a ruined tower house in the middle of nowhere, door hanging off, fig tree growing through the roof. I didn't take photos. It felt like showing off about something that wasn't mine to share.

What struck me, wandering those back roads, was how much I'd previously missed by being so determined to arrive somewhere. The proper destination, the checked box, the review to write. Here, the wrong turns were the whole point. I'd arrive back at the villa dusty and slightly sun-addled, with no story more dramatic than "turned left instead of right, found a thing." Yet those evenings, watching the sun drop into the Gulf of Corinth with whatever Yorgos-equivalent I'd discovered that day, felt more genuinely holiday than any organised excursion ever managed.

On my final morning I tried to find that first taverna again. Failed completely. Drove in circles for an hour before giving up and finding somewhere else equally accidental, equally perfect. Some things, I decided, aren't meant to be repeated. You get them once, like the best wrong turns, and that's rather the beauty of it.