I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I tried to unlock someone else's hire car in the Naples airport car park. Fifteen minutes of increasingly desperate button pressing, a small crowd of sympathetic Italians offering advice, and one deeply unimpressed car hire employee later, I finally twigged I'd wandered two rows over from where I'd actually parked. Not my finest moment, and certainly not the relaxed start I'd envisioned for our week in Campania.

The drive down to Agropoli was properly gorgeous though, once I'd located the correct vehicle. The motorway hugs the coast in that dramatic Italian way, all plunging cliffs and glimpses of impossibly blue sea between tunnels. My partner navigated while I tried not to think about the insurance excess, and by the time we turned inland towards our accommodation, the late afternoon light was doing that golden thing that makes everything look like a film set.

We'd booked what the website called a "rustic farmhouse apartment," which turned out to be one of those descriptions that doesn't quite capture the reality. The reality involved a dirt track that our sensible British hatchback was not remotely designed for, a sat nav that confidently directed us towards what appeared to be someone's olive grove, and a growing conviction that we were being pranked. The track narrowed, then narrowed again, until we were essentially driving through someone's garden. I stopped to ask directions from an elderly gentleman tending his tomatoes, and managed to conduct an entire conversation in my appalling GCSE Italian without either of us understanding a word the other said. He smiled and pointed vaguely uphill. We pressed on.

The place itself, when we finally found it, was perched on a hillside with views that made the whole ordeal instantly worthwhile. Terracotta roofs, a crumbling stone wall covered in bougainvillea, and that particular quality of silence you only get when you're genuinely in the middle of nowhere. Our host, a woman called Rosa who appeared to communicate primarily through expressive hand gestures and sudden bursts of laughter, showed us around with the air of someone who found our exhaustion genuinely amusing.

What struck me immediately was how completely we'd left the tourist trail behind. No English voices, no organised excursions, no carefully curated "authentic experiences." Just the sound of cicadas, the smell of rosemary and warm stone, and the realisation that we were going to have to figure things out for ourselves.

That evening, hungry and too tired to attempt the track again in darkness, we decided to walk. Rosa had mentioned a village "nearby," which in her estimation meant forty minutes of steep downhill paths that started as a lane, became a track, then devolved into something I can only describe as a suggestion of a route between dry stone walls. We got lost almost immediately, of course, taking a wrong turn where a goat path split from the human one without any clear indication which was which.

The village we eventually stumbled into wasn't the one Rosa had described. It was smaller, sleepier, seemingly surprised to see us. A single bar was open, where an old man watched football with the volume up and a younger woman served us beer and something she called "just snacks" that turned out to be the most extraordinary fried courgette flowers, still warm from the pan, stuffed with mozzarella that pulled apart in that perfect stringy way. We ate at a plastic table outside, watched by a cat of indeterminate age, and felt something shift. The getting lost had become the point. The wrong turn had delivered us somewhere we couldn't have found on purpose.

Walking back in near darkness, phone torches picking out the uneven ground, I found myself thinking about how much of my normal life is spent avoiding exactly this kind of uncertainty. The planned itinerary, the reviewed restaurant, the optimised route. There's something to be said for the unplanned stumble, the place you find when you're not looking, the meal you eat because it's simply what's available in the moment you need it.

We spent the rest of the week deliberately getting lost, which I recognise sounds like a contradiction. But there's a particular kind of lost that's available in countryside like this, where you're never truly stranded, just temporarily uncertain. We found a beach that didn't appear on any map we consulted, down a path that started between two houses and descended through scrubby maquis until it delivered us to a tiny cove where the water was so clear you could watch fish inspecting your toes. We found a bakery in a village whose name we never properly established, where the owner spoke no English but communicated through enthusiastic pointing that we absolutely must try her sfogliatelle, still warm, the pastry shattering in that way that leaves you picking flakes off your shirt for hours afterwards.

The track to our accommodation never got easier, and I never quite mastered reversing up the steeper sections without mild panic. But by the end of the week, I'd stopped worrying about it. Some things aren't meant to be smooth, I think. Some holidays aren't about ticking off sights or collecting experiences like stamps. They're about the wrong turn that leads to the right place, the conversation conducted in mutual incomprehension, the realisation that being slightly out of your depth is often exactly where you need to be.

I still think about that fried courgette flower, and the particular quality of light on that hillside as we arrived, exhausted and slightly hysterical, to somewhere we hadn't expected to find.