I have never been so relieved to see a man holding a goat as I was when we finally found our holiday let in Orosei.

The trouble started at Olbia airport, where I had confidently told my partner that I did not need a sat nav. "I have downloaded the map," I said, tapping my phone with the smugness of someone who had never actually driven in Sardinia before. Three hours later, we were halfway up a mountain track that seemed to be composed entirely of loose scree and regret. A shepherd appeared from behind an olive tree, surveyed our Fiat Panda with the expression of a man who had seen many such fools, and wordlessly pointed back down the hill. His goat, I noticed, wore a more sympathetic look.

We found the proper road eventually, and the NOVASOL property when we did finally arrive looked exactly as the pictures had promised: pale stone walls, a modest terrace with bougainvillea doing its best to take over, and a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea that made the whole goat incident feel rather worth it. Our neighbour was already there, a woman in her seventies called Maria Luisa who was watering her tomatoes with the focused intensity of a cardiac surgeon.

"You came the mountain way," she said. It was not a question.

She introduced us to her husband, Giovanni, who emerged from their house holding a plastic tub of freshly made pecorino and the air of someone who had been waiting all morning for an audience. He spoke no English and I speak barely any Italian, but between us we managed a conversation of spectacular inefficiency. He would say something lengthy and enthusiastic, I would catch perhaps three words, and Maria Luisa would translate with visible impatience. "He says the cheese is from this morning. He says you must eat it today. He says you are too thin." She looked me up and down. "He is wrong about this last thing."

The pecorino was extraordinary, sharp and grassy and nothing like the sad blocks wrapped in plastic at our supermarket back home. Giovanni watched me eat it with the anxious pride of a parent at a school play, and when I made what I hoped was an appreciative noise, he produced a bottle of homemade mirto from somewhere and poured three glasses without asking.

By late afternoon we had met half the street, or so it seemed. There was the young man from two doors down who delivered our keys with a long and apparently hilarious story about a German tourist who had once locked himself out while naked, though I may have misunderstood several crucial details. There was an elderly gentleman who walked past slowly every forty minutes precisely, always with the same small dog, always with the same greeting of "Bella, bella" directed at no one in particular. There was a woman selling vegetables from the back of a three-wheeled van who refused to let me leave with just the courgettes I had asked for, insisting I also needed her tomatoes, her basil, and something she described as "for the stomach" that I later identified as wild fennel.

What struck me, and what I kept coming back to as I sat on that terrace with my illicit glass of mirto, was how thoroughly they had absorbed us into their ordinary day. No one performed Sardinia for us. Maria Luisa complained about Giovanni's snoring with the frankness of someone who had long stopped caring what strangers thought. The vegetable woman argued with another customer about whether the melons were ready while I stood there holding my courgettes, ignored and included all at once.

I had arrived that morning with my phone maps and my airport coffee and my general sense of being a capable modern traveller. By evening I was someone who had got lost, been rescued by a goat, and been told by a near stranger that I was too thin while eating his cheese. It was not the holiday I had planned. It was already, I suspected, going to be a better one.