I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I tried to put diesel in a petrol Fiat at Olbia airport. There I stood, nozzle in hand, wondering why it would not fit, while an elderly Sardinian man watched from his bench with the patient amusement of someone who had seen this dozens of times before. He wandered over, tapped the green sticker by the fuel cap, and said simply "Benzina." I felt like a proper melt, but he patted my shoulder as if to say we all have our moments.

The drive to Lu Fraile took about twenty minutes, though I managed to stretch it to forty by following what I thought was a shortcut. It was not a shortcut. It was a dirt track that wound through scrubland where wild pigs eyed me with what I can only describe as professional disappointment. But that wrong turn became the pattern of the whole trip, really. Getting gloriously, accidentally lost.

Lu Fraile itself sits just outside San Teodoro, close enough to walk into town for a morning coffee but tucked away among low stone walls and umbrella pines. My first evening, I set out for what I intended to be a brief stroll before dinner. I had a map on my phone, which promptly died at 17 percent because I had been using it as a torch to find the outdoor light switch. Typical.

So there I was, wandering down a lane that grew progressively narrower, until it became little more than a path between two drystone walls. The sun was dropping fast, painting everything that warm honey colour you only seem to get in the Mediterranean. I could hear the sea somewhere to my left, though I could not see it through the dense macchia shrubland. Then the path opened up without warning onto a tiny cove I later learned has no official name, or at least none the locals bother with. Just a curve of coarse sand, maybe thirty metres across, with water so clear I could see fish darting between my ankles when I waded in.

I went back the next morning with a proper torch and still nearly missed the turning. That became my spot for the week. I never saw more than four other people there, usually a local family with bread and cheese, children shrieking at the cold water.

Another afternoon, I took the bicycle that came with the property and headed vaguely north, intending to reach La Cinta beach. I never made it. Instead I found myself at a vineyard where an old couple were harvesting Vermentino grapes by hand. They did not speak English, my Italian extends to ordering food and profuse apologising, but somehow we communicated through gestures and laughter. I ended up staying for three hours, helping load crates onto a battered trailer, and left with a bottle they refused payment for. I still have the label stuck in my notebook.

The property itself was simple and spotless, with a terrace where I ate most meals, buying pecorino and flatbread from a shop in San Teodoro whose owner learned my order by day three. The kitchen had everything needed for proper cooking, though my attempt at fregola with clams ended up more fregola with clam fragments after I discovered sand in places sand should not be.

What struck me most was how the mishaps became the memories. The fuel confusion, the dead phone, the culinary disaster. Each one pushed me somewhere unexpected. I had planned to visit the famous beaches, the photographed coves, the recommended restaurants. Instead I found nameless places, patient strangers, and a quiet confidence in my own terrible sense of direction.

On my final morning I tried to find that first cove one last time and failed completely. Walked up and down the lane three times before giving up and laughing at myself on a wall in the sunshine. Some places, I decided, are meant to stay slightly lost. That is rather the point of them.