I have always believed that the best holidays are the ones where you accidentally take a wrong turn and end up somewhere brilliant. Our recent trip to a farmhouse between Todi and Acquasparta in Umbria proved me absolutely right, though I will admit the initial wrong turn was less "romantic discovery" and more "husband and wife silently fuming in a hire car."

The journey from Perugia airport had been going suspiciously well. We had navigated the ring road, found the SS3bis without argument, and were feeling rather smug about our map-reading prowess. Then I spotted what I was convinced was a shortcut. "That looks pretty," I announced, pointing at a narrow lane curling between cypress trees. My husband, Mark, made that noise he makes when he knows better but has learned that life is easier if he just goes along with things.

Twenty minutes later, our Fiat Punto was wedged between two stone walls on a track clearly designed for donkeys. I was navigating using a sunflower as my main landmark. Mark was doing his breathing exercises. A local farmer appeared from nowhere, leaning on a hoe with the patient expression of someone who has watched many tourists do exactly this. He waved us back the way we had come, adding what I am fairly certain was commentary on British intelligence, though my Italian is not good enough to confirm.

We arrived at the farmhouse flustered, dusty, and ready for a stiff drink. But stepping out of the car, something shifted. The place sat on a gentle slope surrounded by olive groves, with nothing but birdsong and the occasional distant church bell. Our host, a woman called Luisa with flour on her apron and a warm smile, simply handed us glasses of chilled white wine and said, "You found the long way, then." She made it sound like a compliment.

That first evening, still slightly giddy from relief and alcohol, we decided to walk before dinner. We had no plan, no map, just a vague intention to stretch our legs. The lane behind the property led uphill through woods, and we followed it without discussion, the way you do when you are too relaxed to make decisions. After ten minutes, the trees opened onto a small clearing with a ruined chapel, its roof long gone but its walls still standing. Wildflowers grew between the stones. A wooden bench faced west, positioned perfectly for sunset. There was no sign, no information board, no other visitors. We sat there for an hour, watching the light turn golden across the valley, and I felt that particular holiday happiness that comes from unexpected beauty.

The next morning, properly ambitious, we set out to get deliberately lost. Luisa had mentioned a river somewhere below the property, so we took a path that looked promising and immediately proved not to be. We wandered through fields of sunflowers, past a farm where an old man was hand-tying vines and offered us figs from his tree, down a track that became a stream that became a scramble through brambles. Mark tore his shorts. I got a twig in my hair that I did not find until bedtime. We were, by any objective measure, making a complete hash of things.

Then we heard water, and emerged from the undergrowth onto a stony beach beside the Tiber, shallow and clear at that point, with dragonflies skimming the surface. A heron watched us from a rock, unimpressed. We paddled, ate our squashed sandwiches, and I thought about how often I plan holidays to death, filling every hour with recommended restaurants and must-see sights, and how rarely that approach delivers anything as good as this accidental afternoon.

We spent five days doing variations of the same thing. A wrong turning on the way to Todi led us to a tiny village, Massa Martana, where a cafe owner insisted we try his wife's freshly baked ciambellone and would not accept payment. An attempt to find a supermarket took us past a vineyard whose owner was pruning and happy to talk for forty minutes about Sagrantino grapes while we pretended to understand. Even our return journey to the airport became an adventure when roadworks diverted us onto back lanes, where we discovered a monastery selling honey from a honesty box.

I am not suggesting that getting lost is always wise. Mark's shorts never recovered, and I am still slightly haunted by that farmer's expression. But I have returned from Umbria with a changed attitude, or perhaps a recovered one. The world is full of places that will never appear in guidebooks, full of people who do not expect tourists but welcome them anyway. You cannot find them by looking. You find them by being willing to look foolish, to backtrack, to accept that your shortcut was absolutely not a shortcut and that this is, in fact, the entire point.

We have already booked to return next spring. Luisa has promised to give us worse directions.