I have never been very good at reading maps, which is a polite way of saying that my sense of direction is roughly on par with a confused pigeon. So when my partner handed me the hire car keys at Naples Airport and suggested I navigate us to our Castellabate holiday let, I should have smelled disaster brewing like a pot of over-stewed Neapolitan coffee.

The drive down the coast started well enough. The A3 motorway hugs the Tyrrhenian Sea with views that make you want to pull over every five minutes, and I was feeling rather pleased with myself as we passed Salerno. Then I took what I confidently declared was "definitely a shortcut" and found us winding up a single-track road into the hills above Agropoli, the sat nav making increasingly frantic recalculating noises while I pretended everything was fine.

Three wrong turns and one deeply unhelpful encounter with a goat later, we crested a ridge and there it was. Not our destination, mind you, but something better in that moment. A tiny hamlet clinging to the hillside, no more than a dozen houses and a church the colour of faded apricots. An old man sat outside his garage fixing a fishing net, and he waved at us with the easy warmth of someone who has seen countless lost tourists before. We stopped. We gestured helplessly. He laughed, pointed down a track I would never have noticed, and within ten minutes we were descending towards the coast through lemon groves so heavily laden the air itself seemed sharp and sweet.

Our actual arrival at the Castellabate property was almost an anticlimax after that. The key safe code worked, the terrace looked out over olive trees to the sea, and everything was precisely as advertised. But I kept thinking about that wrong turn, the accidental village, the unexpected kindness.

The next morning, determined to recreate whatever magic had happened by mistake, I suggested we deliberately get lost. My partner raised an eyebrow but humoured me. We set off with no particular plan, took the first unmarked track we found heading inland from the property, and within half an hour were wandering through woodland that felt untouched by any guidebook. A clearing opened onto a ruined stone cottage, its roof long gone, wild fig trees growing through what had once been a kitchen. Someone had left a rusted chair there, facing the valley, as if the ghost of the place still liked to sit and watch the light change.

We found our way down to the coast eventually, not at the main beach near Santa Maria but at a cove so small I am not sure it has a name. A fisherman was pulling his boat up onto the shingle, and we helped him haul it clear of the tide. He gave us two sea bream in return, refusing payment, and mimed that we should cook them simply with lemon and oil. We did, back at the property, eating on that terrace as the sun went down and feeling absurdly pleased with ourselves for having stumbled into something authentic.

The rest of the week continued in this fashion. A wrong turning on the way to buy bread led us to a vineyard where an elderly couple were pressing grapes by hand, something I thought had died out decades ago. They let us taste the must, still fizzy and rough, and sent us away with a bottle of something properly finished that we saved for our last evening. Another afternoon, seeking shade from the September heat, we ducked through an archway in a wall and found ourselves in a garden belonging to a convent, nuns tending vegetables in companionable silence, one of them nodding us toward a fountain where we filled our water bottles with water so cold it made our teeth ache.

I have been on holidays where every hour was planned, every restaurant researched, every viewpoint ticked off a list. This was not that kind of trip. The Castellabate property was comfortable, well-equipped, exactly what we needed as a base, but the real discovery was what happened when I stopped trying to be in charge of where we went. My natural incompetence with directions, usually a source of mild shame, became something like a gift. Each wrong turn was an invitation, each unmarked path a possibility.

On our final day, we tried to find that first accidental hamlet again, the one with the apricot-coloured church and the laughing old man. We failed, of course. Took a different wrong turn entirely, ended up somewhere else equally unexpected, watched the sun set over a ridge we had never seen before. I think that is probably the point. You cannot plan to get lost on purpose and expect the same result. The best you can do is stay open, keep walking, and trust that the goat blocking your path might actually be doing you a favour.