I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up driving our hire car down what I can only describe as a goat track above Diano Marina, convinced my phone was taking us on a scenic route. It was not scenic. It was terrifying. My partner sat in silence, gripping the door handle, while I muttered apologies and tried to reverse up a gravel slope without sending us tumbling into somebody's olive grove. Forty minutes late, sweaty, and deeply humbled, we finally found the proper road and rolled up to our holiday home with the sort of relief you normally reserve for finding a toilet after a long motorway journey.

The place itself made the chaos worthwhile. A proper Ligurian spot, all pastel walls and terracotta, with a terrace that looked down through lemon trees toward the sea. I stood there with a cold beer, still slightly shaking from my navigational disaster, and decided that getting lost might actually be the best way to arrive somewhere. You appreciate the calm more when you have just survived mild peril.

We had packed our walking boots with grand plans for serious hiking. The Ligurian coast is famous for it, all those old mule tracks connecting fishing villages, the Sentiero del Ponente luring you with promises of dramatic views and charming trattorias at the end. Our first morning, we set off from Diano Marina itself, heading west along the coastal path toward Imperia. The sun sat low and golden, the sea that particular Mediterranean blue that makes you understand why people paint. I felt smug, honestly. Look at us, doing proper active travel, being cultural, earning our pasta.

The weather had other ideas. By midday, the temperature had climbed past thirty degrees, and I was discovering that Ligurian humidity is a different beast from the dry heat I had naively expected. We found ourselves on an exposed stretch of path with no shade, my shirt plastered to my back, my water bottle already empty, my partner looking at me with that expression that says "you planned this" without actually speaking. We turned back, defeated, and spent the afternoon collapsed on our terrace like lizards on hot stones.

That evening, over anchovies and cold white wine at a little place near the marina, we recalibrated. The heat was not going anywhere. We needed to work with it, not against it. So we became early risers, setting alarms that felt criminal on holiday, heading out at dawn when the light was soft and the paths still held coolness from the night. We walked the old railway line that runs flat behind the coast, now a cycling and pedestrian route, watching the sun come up over the water and the fishing boats heading out. We explored the hillside paths above Diano Marina itself, short loops through terraced gardens where old men tended vegetables and ignored us completely.

The afternoons became ours for swimming, for reading on the terrace, for slow lunches that stretched until four. It was not the rugged coastal adventure I had imagined, all sweat and achievement. It was something better, something that actually suited us. I realised, with the gentle embarrassment of someone who takes too long to learn obvious things, that forcing a plan because it sounds good is a fast way to a miserable holiday.

On our last morning, we walked down to the seafront before breakfast, the town still quiet, the water flat and silver. A fisherman was mending nets on the beach. We bought warm focaccia from a bakery just opening its shutters. I thought about my goat track disaster, my heat exhaustion, my stubbornness, and I laughed. Sometimes you need to get properly lost, and properly overheated, to find what you actually needed all along.