I thought I'd nailed the navigation. I'd spent a solid twenty minutes the night before poring over Google Maps, smugly screenshotting the route from Perugia airport to our holiday let in Tuoro sul Trasimeno. "It's basically a straight line," I told my partner, waving my phone about with the confidence of someone who once found their way out of IKEA without crying. Reader, I had not nailed the navigation.

The trouble began at a roundabout somewhere near Magione. One moment we were cruising past sunflower fields, the next we were on a gravel track that grew progressively narrower, bumpier, and more committed to the concept of "rural." My partner, who had been peacefully dozing, woke to find us wedged between two cypress trees with a very judgmental goat staring through the windscreen. "Shortcut?" she asked, in that particular tone that manages to be both supportive and deeply unimpressed.

We eventually emerged, dusty and chastened, onto a road that actually appeared on maps. But here's the thing about getting properly lost in Umbria: you stumble onto places no guidebook would ever bother with. That wrong turn deposited us at a tiny hamlet called Vernazzano, perched on a ridge above the lake with a view so perfect it looked like someone had painted it to apologise for the goat incident. An elderly chap was tending tomatoes in his garden and waved us over for a glass of water and some halting conversation about the football. His wife produced figs from a tree that must have been a hundred years old. We stayed twenty minutes and left with directions, a bag of fruit, and the slightly bewildered feeling that we'd accidentally gatecrashed someone's afternoon.

The actual property, when we finally found it, turned out to be one of those classic stone farmhouses with a pool and olive trees, the sort of place that makes you feel slightly fraudulent for being allowed to stay there. But by then I'd developed a taste for wrong turns. The next morning, instead of heading sensibly to the lakefront, I took a path that looked like it probably went somewhere interesting. It didn't, not really. It went to a field of abandoned farm machinery and a lot of nettles. But doubling back, I spotted a gap in a hedge that led to a tiny chapel, San Bartolomeo, with a door that creaked open to reveal frescoes so faded you could barely make them out. No signs, no opening hours, no other visitors. Just me, some medieval saints, and the distant sound of someone pruning vines.

That became the pattern of the week. The planned outings to Passignano and Castiglione del Lago happened, and they were perfectly pleasant in that straightforward, ice-cream-and-a-wander sort of way. But the moments that stuck were the accidents. The bakery in a village whose name I never properly caught, where the woman apologised for having only one type of bread left and then sold me something warm and rosemary-scented that ruined supermarket baguettes forever. The swimming spot we found by following a local family carrying inflatable crocodiles down a track that started between two parked tractors. The evening we got confused by the one-way system in Tuoro itself and ended up circling the same piazza three times, which meant we noticed the tiny enoteca that everyone else seemed to walk straight past.

I'm not going to pretend this was some profound spiritual journey. Mostly it was me being bad at directions in a very scenic setting. But there was something genuinely lovely about surrendering to the possibility that you don't know where you're going, and that this might be preferable. At home, I'd have been furious with myself for the goat-track detour. In Umbria, with the windows down and the smell of warm stone and wild fennel, it felt like the whole point.

On our final evening, we tried to find that chapel again. Failed completely, naturally. Ended up at a different viewpoint entirely, watching the sun drop behind Isola Maggiore while a farmer burned off vine cuttings somewhere below, the smoke rising straight up into the pink sky. "We should get lost more often," my partner said. I didn't argue. Though I did, finally, download an offline map for the drive back to the airport. Some lessons you learn slowly.