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 somewhere north of Budoni, convinced I had found a shortcut to our holiday let. My partner sat in silence, gripping the door handle, while I cheerfully insisted the sat nav knew what it was doing. It did not. Twenty minutes of reversing past startled sheep later, we emerged onto actual tarmac, dusty, slightly hysterical, and ready for a large glass of something cold.

The property itself sat tucked among low scrub and umbrella pines, the sort of place that makes you exhale without realising you have been holding your breath. A terrace wrapped around the front, and beyond it the garden sloped down toward glimpses of turquoise that I initially assumed was a swimming pool but turned out to be the actual sea. I felt this counted as a win, directionally challenged or not.

We had arrived in late May, armed with ambitious hiking plans and a guidebook to coastal trails. The weather, we had been assured by a neighbour at Gatwick who holidayed here annually, would be perfect. Warm but not oppressive. Ideal for long walks. What nobody mentioned was the mistral, that stubborn north-westerly wind that sweeps across Sardinia with theatrical unpredictability. It arrived our second morning, rattling the shutters and sending my carefully laid plans scattering like the pine needles across the terrace.

Our first attempted walk along the coast path from Porto Ottiolu ended with me clutching my hat with one hand and my dignity with the other, retreating to a beach bar for granita while locals looked on with the amused sympathy of people who know better than to argue with the wind. The trail itself looked glorious, threading between granite outcrops and maquis scrub, but progress was impossible without risking an unplanned swim.

This became the pattern of our week. We would wake to stillness, bolt down coffee, and strike out toward the headlands east of Budoni, only to find the breeze strengthening by mid-morning. One morning we made it as far as the coves near San Lorenzo before the weather turned, settling on a sheltered limestone shelf to watch the sea churn from relative calm. Another day we abandoned the coast entirely and walked inland through cork oak woods, where the trees provided some protection and the temperature climbed satisfyingly into the high twenties.

I found myself strangely grateful for the wind's interference. Without it, I suspect we would have marched through our itinerary with dutiful efficiency, ticking off viewpoints and measuring kilometres. Instead we slowed down, adapted, learned to read the morning sky for clues. We discovered a tiny cala accessible only by scrambling down a gully, protected enough to swim even when the exposed beaches were whipped white. We found a family-run agriturismo where we lingered over lunch because walking anywhere afterwards seemed unappealing.

By our final day, when the mistral finally exhausted itself and left the coast in glassy calm, I almost missed its disruptive presence. We walked the full stretch from Budoni to Torre San Giovanni, the tower a pale finger against blue sky, and the path was everything I had imagined. Wild rosemary scented the air. Lizards scattered from warm rocks. The sea fell away in graduated turquoise that no photograph could capture adequately.

I stopped at one point, slightly breathless from the climb, and watched my partner disappear round a bend ahead. The hat I had lost to the wind on day three remained somewhere in a gully, probably decorating a sheep. My guidebook had waterlogged pages from a sudden shower we had not anticipated. None of it had gone to plan, and I could not have been more content with that.