I have always believed that the best holidays begin with something going slightly wrong, and our trip to Lauco in the Dolomiti Friulane did not disappoint. We had been driving from Venice Marco Polo airport, full of that smug energy you get when a flight lands on time and the hire car has working air conditioning. The sat nav said two hours, the guidebook said scenic, and I said I absolutely did not need to stop for a wee at the services near Pordenone. Reader, I needed to stop for a wee. By the time we reached the turn-off for Lauco, I was performing that special seated dance that only the truly desperate know, and I missed the sign entirely.

What followed was twenty minutes of increasingly narrow roads, my partner Tom doing his best to remain supportive while I muttered about needing to find a bush, and then suddenly we were somewhere else entirely. Not lost, exactly. Just not where we intended to be. The tarmac gave way to gravel, the gravel gave way to something that might generously be called a track, and then we rounded a bend and found ourselves looking down at a village that did not appear on our map.

It was called, we later learned, Casso. A handful of stone houses clinging to a hillside, with a church bell that rang once while we sat there in silence. No tourists. No souvenir shop. Just an old man sitting on a wall who raised his hand in greeting as if Americans in a Fiat Panda were the most ordinary thing in the world. I forgot about needing the loo. We got out and walked, because what else do you do when the universe drops a place like that in your lap?

That became the pattern of our week at the Lauco property. The house itself was lovely, all wooden beams and that particular hush you get in mountain villages where the air feels cleaner just for being there. But I am not going to tell you about the house, not really. I am going to tell you about getting lost.

We set out each morning with a plan. A walk to this rifugio, a drive to that viewpoint. And each morning, somehow, we ended up somewhere else. The path that was supposed to lead to a waterfall instead deposited us in a meadow where a farmer was making cheese in a shed that smelled of woodsmoke and ambition. He spoke no English, we spoke barely any Italian, and yet we spent an hour there, tasting something he called formadi frant and pretending we understood his explanation of the process.

Another day, a wrong turning on what Tom insisted was a shortcut took us down to the Cellina gorge, where we found a trail that seemed to belong to nobody but the lizards and the occasional chamois. We walked for hours without seeing another person, which in retrospect was probably unwise, but at the time felt like the most sensible thing we had ever done. The silence there was not empty. It was full of something I cannot name, something that made me realise how much noise I normally carry around in my head.

I think that is what I want to remember most. Not the planned things, though the planned things were fine. The unplanned things. The village of Claut, where we stopped for petrol and stayed for lunch because the bar had a dog that looked like it had opinions. The swimming hole we found by following a local's vague gesture down a road that grew progressively less road-like. The evening we tried to find a restaurant reviewers raved about, failed completely, and instead ate polenta and mushrooms at a place where the owner apologised for not having a menu, then fed us until we could barely move.

By the end of the week, we stopped making plans altogether. We would wake up, look at each other, and drive in a direction that felt interesting. Sometimes we found nothing much. Sometimes we found something that made us grin at each other like children who had discovered a secret. The Dolomiti Friulane are full of secrets, I think. You just have to be willing to miss your turn to find them.

On our last day, we tried to find Casso again, to say thank you in some way to the place that had started it all. We could not find it. The roads we had taken seemed to have shifted, or perhaps we had never really known them at all. Tom suggested I had been in such a state that first day that I had imagined the whole thing. I prefer to think that some places only appear when you need them, and that needing a wee near Pordenone was the best navigational error I ever made.