I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I managed to get our hire car stuck in a sheep traffic jam before we'd even found the village. There we were, two hours out of Olbia airport, puttering along a dusty track that my phone swore was a road, surrounded by dozens of unimpressed Sardinian sheep who clearly had right of way. My partner just sat there, slowly eating the last of the airport sandwiches, refusing to make eye contact.

Orgosolo itself appeared eventually, clinging to a hillside like it had been dropped there by accident and decided to stay. I'd booked what the website called a "traditional Sardinian holiday home," which turned out to be a solid stone house with walls thick enough to withstand a siege and a front door that required a shoulder-charge to open. The key was hidden in a flowerpot that contained, as far as I could tell, more dust than horticulture.

The first evening, we did what any sensible person does in an unfamiliar place: we got hopelessly lost within five minutes of leaving the house. The village is a maze of narrow lanes and sudden staircases, and my phone signal had given up somewhere around the sheep encounter. We turned a corner expecting to find our street and instead found ourselves face to face with a mural of a giant blue fish painted across somebody's kitchen wall. Orgosolo is famous for these murals, political and fantastical, splashed across buildings with absolutely no regard for property boundaries. We spent twenty minutes just standing there, heads tilted, working out whether the fish was meant to represent capitalism or simply someone's enthusiastic cousin with a paintbrush.

That accidental wrong turn became the pattern of the whole trip. The next morning, attempting to find a bakery, we wandered down a lane that narrowed until it was basically a crack between two houses, then emerged into a tiny piazza where three old men sat playing cards at a wobbly table. They looked up with the resigned patience of people who regularly watch tourists blunder through their lives. I attempted my best "dove il pane?" and was directed, via elaborate hand gestures, to a back room in someone's house where an ancient woman sold us warm pane carasau that cracked like biscuits and tasted of smoke and salt.

We never did find the proper bakery. We found something better.

The same happened with swimming spots. Following a sign to a "beach" that turned out to be a gravel car park and a steep path, we kept walking out of stubbornness, down through scratchy maquis scrub, until the land dropped away and there was a cove below us with water so clear it looked like someone had forgotten to render the texture. No facilities, no other people, just rocks to perch on and fish darting about in the shallows. We went back three times and never saw another soul.

Even the local bar we accidentally commandeered, thinking it was a restaurant, became our evening ritual. The owner, Pietro, eventually stopped trying to explain he only served coffee and beer, and started producing plates of pecorino and cured meats from somewhere behind the counter. His English was roughly equal to my Italian, which is to say catastrophic, but we communicated through the international language of pointing at things and looking grateful.

By the end of the week, I'd stopped trying to navigate entirely. We found a shepherd's track that led to a viewpoint over the Supramonte mountains, purely because I was following a lizard and got distracted. We discovered a tiny church with a door permanently open and candles still burning, tucked between two houses where no church should logically fit. We ate wild figs from a tree we'd stopped under because I needed to tie my shoelace.

There's something humbling about realising your best experiences come from incompetence. I'm normally the sort of person who researches restaurants, checks opening hours, arrives precisely on time. In Orgosolo, my complete failure to plan or navigate became the whole point. The island seemed to reward aimlessness, to tuck its proper treasures behind corners you only find when you're confidently heading the wrong way.

On our final evening, we got lost again trying to find Pietro's bar. Wound up instead at the edge of the village, watching the sun drop behind limestone hills that turned progressively more orange, then pink, then finally that deep bruised purple that happens before proper darkness. A dog barked somewhere. Somewhere else, a scooter puttered. We stood there, slightly chilly, slightly hungry, completely content.

I still don't know the name of that street. I couldn't find it again if you paid me. Which, I suppose, is exactly as it should be.