I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a minor disaster, and our trip to Albarella did not disappoint. We had been driving down from Bologna airport, full of optimism and terrible motorway coffee, when I made the fatal error of trusting the sat nav's "scenic route." Three wrong turns and one deeply suspicious level crossing later, we found ourselves on a dusty track between salt flats, watching a flamingo stare at us with what I can only describe as avian judgment. My partner, ever the pragmatist, suggested we ask for directions. I, being a man, drove in circles for another twenty minutes before admitting defeat to a fisherman who spoke exclusively in dialect and hand gestures.

The actual approach to Albarella, when we finally found it, felt like discovering a secret. The island is connected to the mainland by a narrow bridge, and crossing it gives you that peculiar thrill of leaving ordinary life behind. Our holiday home sat among pines on the edge of a lagoon, the sort of place you would never stumble upon deliberately. We had booked it for the golf course, if I am honest, and the promise of decent cycling paths. What we found instead was something far better: the peculiar joy of having absolutely no idea where we were going.

The next morning, still bleary from travel and perhaps one too many Aperol spritzes, we set off on bicycles with no particular destination. Albarella's road network is deliberately confusing, a maze of sandy tracks and shaded paths that all look essentially identical. Within ten minutes we were lost. Properly, hopelessly lost, surrounded by maritime pines and the distant sound of what I desperately hoped was the sea rather than another lagoon. We pedalled past abandoned tennis courts reclaimed by wildflowers, past villas hidden behind hedges of oleander, past a small chapel with its door hanging open and nobody inside.

And then, quite by accident, we found the beach. Not the main beach with its orderly rows of umbrellas and its sensible facilities. This was a narrow strip of sand on the lagoon side, where the water was so shallow you could walk fifty metres out and still touch the bottom. A single wooden pier stretched into water the colour of weak tea, and an elderly man sat fishing from it with the patience of someone who had absolutely nowhere else to be. We stayed for hours, swimming in water warm as bathwater, watching herons stalk through the reeds. We had not brought towels, or water, or any sensible provisions. We did not care.

The following days became a deliberate exercise in purposeful wandering. We found a bakery operating from someone's garage, selling piadine still warm from the griddle. We discovered a vineyard on the island's southern tip, where a woman named Carla poured us sangiovese and told us about the floods of 1966 while her cat slept on the wine barrels. We stumbled into a birdwatching hide at sunset and sat in embarrassed silence with three Germans who had proper binoculars and knew what they were looking at.

What struck me, eventually, was how thoroughly we had stopped trying. There is a particular modern anxiety to holiday planning, this compulsion to optimise every moment, to tick experiences off some invisible list. Getting lost on Albarella stripped all that away. We ate when we found food, swam when we found water, rested when we found shade. The island's peculiar geography, that sense of being slightly removed from the mainland's bustle, seemed to remove our compulsion to be anywhere in particular.

On our final evening, we got lost one last time. The sun was setting, we were cycling down yet another identical sandy track, and I felt that familiar flutter of mild panic. But my partner just laughed, and we kept pedalling, and somehow we emerged at a small marina we had never seen before, where a man was grilling sardines over charcoal and selling them wrapped in paper. We sat on the harbour wall, eating with our fingers, watching the sky turn the particular pink-orange that only happens above the Adriatic.

I still do not know the name of that marina. I could not find it again if you paid me. That is rather the point.