I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Lignano Sabbiadoro proved me absolutely right. We had been driving down from Venice Marco Polo airport, full of that smug post-flight energy, windows down, Italian radio blaring something inexplicably cheerful. My partner was navigating, I was driving, and somewhere between Portogruaro and Latisana, we missed the turning. Not by a little. By a spectacular, fifteen-mile detour through flat farmland and irrigation canals that looked identical to the last fifteen miles. We ended up in a village called, if memory serves, something like Borgo Qualcosa, where an elderly gentleman in a flat cap directed us back with elaborate hand gestures that suggested we were complete idiots. He was not wrong.

By the time we reached the holiday home, that particular brand of travel exhaustion had set in where everything feels slightly unreal. The property was one of those smart terraced arrangements, all neat balconies and pale render, the sort that clusters together near the pine woods behind the main beach strip. We dumped our bags, too tired to appreciate anything properly, and decided to walk before we unpacked. This proved to be the best decision of the entire fortnight.

We wandered without purpose, which is not like me at all. I am the sort who researches restaurants, bookmarks beaches, plans walking routes. But that evening, still slightly disorientated from our navigational incompetence, we simply followed our feet. The main drag of Viale Centrale was predictably busy with gelato-seekers and evening strollers, so we ducked down a side street, then another, working our way toward the smell of pine rather than the sound of the sea.

That is how we found the old fishermen's quarter, or what remains of it. Not the polished marina with its expensive boats, but the warren of narrow lanes behind, where small houses with peeling paint still have nets drying in back gardens and old men repair tackle on doorsteps. No signs pointed there. No guidebook mentioned it. We stumbled upon a tiny bacaro, really just a room with three tables and a counter, where a woman served us prosecco and cicchetti that tasted of actual effort rather than tourist turnover. She spoke no English, we spoke minimal Italian, and the conversation was one of those magical misunderstandings where everyone laughs constantly without knowing precisely why.

The next morning, determined to continue our accidental approach, we hired bicycles from a shop near the property and set off with no destination. The flat terrain helps enormously with this strategy. We pedalled east along the lagoon side, away from the organised beach clubs, and discovered a stretch of water's edge where locals were digging for clams, their buckets arranged in neat rows. Further on, a crumbling watchtower emerged from the reeds, one of those forgotten Napoleonic remnants that nobody bothers to fence off or explain. We climbed it illegally, I suspect, and sat on top eating peaches from a roadside stall, watching herons work the shallows.

Getting properly lost became our daily ritual. We found a municipal park, unheralded and slightly overgrown, where pensioners played boules with magnificent seriousness and a stray cat demanded attention. We discovered a bakery operating from someone's garage, the sort of place with no signage, just the smell of warm bread and a handwritten price list. We stumbled into a church during preparations for some local festival, and were pressed into service carrying decorations by a woman who simply assumed we would help.

By the end of the first week, I had to confront something uncomfortable. My usual holiday self, the one with spreadsheets and review sites and carefully optimised itineraries, had not appeared. I had not missed him. There was something genuinely liberating about trusting to chance in a place that rewards it, about accepting that the wrong turning might be the right one after all. The Venetian coast is particularly suited to this approach, I think, because the flat landscape and scattered settlements mean you cannot go dangerously astray. The worst that happens is another irrigation canal, another pine wood, another unexpected discovery.

Our final accidental find came on the last evening. We had meant to return to that first bacaro for a farewell drink, got the lanes muddled again, and instead found ourselves at a community hall where a children's dance performance was ending. Parents were collecting tired offspring, someone was dismantling a sound system, and a man was selling remaining raffle tickets for a bottle of local grappa. We bought three, won nothing, were given plastic cups of wine anyway, and stood in a corner feeling like frauds until an grandmother insisted we join their group for photographs. We appear in somebody's family album now, two confused English people grinning among strangers.

I still do not know the name of that village we initially missed the turning for, or indeed the one we accidentally found. The holiday home was perfectly comfortable, exactly as advertised, with its efficient kitchen and that balcony where we ate breakfast most mornings. But when I remember Lignano Sabbiadoro, I think of narrow lanes that smelled of fish and pine, of watchtowers in reeds, of being slightly lost and entirely content. Some holidays you plan. Others, mercifully, plan themselves.