I have never been so relieved to see a man with a wheelbarrow in my entire life.

The drive down to San Nicola Arcella had been exactly the sort of Calabrian road trip you dream about in January when you're staring at grey skies in Croydon. Mountains dropping into turquoise sea, the odd goat giving you a look, that incredible smell of wild herbs baking in the sun. I'd been patting myself on the back for weeks about booking this little place, a proper stone cottage tucked up in the old town with a terrace that promised sunsets worth writing home about. What I had not factored in was the concept of "pedestrianised" meaning "your Fiat Panda dies here, mate."

I pulled up at what I thought was the address, engine still running, and immediately understood my error. The lane narrowed to roughly the width of an ambitious bicycle. A cat looked at me with undisguised contempt. Behind me, a delivery van had already appeared, its driver gesticulating with the passion of a man who had seen this exact scene a thousand times before.

"Signora," came a voice from a doorway. "You are stuck."

Antonio was seventy if he was a day, wearing trousers that had seen better decades and a cap that probably remembered the war. He said "stuck" with such cheerful certainty that I couldn't even argue. Within minutes he had produced a wheelbarrow from somewhere, enlisted his nephew Gino who was "strong but stupid," and begun transferring my luggage with the efficiency of someone who had clearly done this for every lost tourist since 1987.

"You English," Antonio said, not unkindly, as he wheeled my suitcase past a group of old men playing cards. "Always with the big cars. Last week, Germans with a Mercedes. I tell them, this is not Germany. Here, we walk. We are not lazy."

The card players looked up with the practised interest of men who had been waiting for entertainment. One of them, introduced as Donato, asked if I was single, then immediately told me his grandson was "too good for you, but he is thirty-seven, so we make an exception." This was delivered with a wink that suggested he had made this joke approximately four thousand times and still found it hilarious.

Gino, the strong but stupid nephew, carried my actual body weight in shopping bags I'd done at Lamezia airport. He spoke no English whatsoever but communicated through elaborate pantomime, pointing at buildings and making appreciative noises. At one point he grabbed my arm and pointed at a balcony where a woman was beating a rug with what I can only describe as operatic fury. "Bella," he whispered, then shook his head sadly. "Crazy."

The cottage itself sat above a tiny piazza where a bar had been serving coffee since before Mussolini. The owner, Rosa, appeared before I'd even found my keys. She was eighty, approximately four foot ten, and dressed entirely in black despite the thirty-degree heat. "You are the English," she announced, as if this explained everything unfortunate about my existence. She pressed a limoncello into my hand that burned like forgiveness and told me her husband had died in 2004, "which was annoying because he owed me money."

By the time I made it onto that promised terrace, the sun was doing its golden hour business across the Tyrrhenian Sea, and I could hear Antonio below, telling someone else they were stuck. I thought about how I'd planned this trip with spreadsheets and TripAdvisor reviews, how I'd worried about the right adaptor and whether I'd packed enough sunscreen. None of it mattered. The limoncello hummed in my chest. Somewhere, Gino was probably still pointing at things.

I came to San Nicola Arcella for the view, but what I'll remember is Rosa's dead husband's debts, Donato's hopeless grandson, and a wheelbarrow that saved my dignity. Travel, I've realised, isn't the terrace at sunset. It's the ridiculous bit before, the part where you're absolutely stuck, and someone appears who has absolutely no intention of letting you solve it alone.