I have never been so relieved to see a set of apartment keys as I was when we finally stumbled into Benalmadena, clutching a hire car full of suitcases and what remained of my dignity. The journey from Malaga Airport had started well enough - sunny skies, the Mediterranean glinting to our right, me smugly insisting I did not need sat nav because "how hard can it be to follow signs for the coast?" Famous last words, those. Twenty minutes later we were somewhere near Torremolinos, I was refusing to admit defeat, and my partner was making that face. You know the one. The "I will not say I told you so but my silence is deafening" face.

We got properly lost. Not charmingly lost, not "oh what a delightful detour" lost. Sweating, bickering, circling the same roundabout three times lost. The kind where you start eyeing up random side streets with desperate hope. And that, as it turned out, was the best thing that could have happened.

Because down one of those unplanned turns - a narrow lane climbing away from the main drag, barely wide enough for our Fiat - we found a tiny venta with a hand-painted sign and three tables outside. No menu in English, no TripAdvisor sticker, just an old chap grilling sardines over charcoal and a fridge full of cold Cruzcampo. We stopped because I needed the loo and a moment to compose myself. We stayed for two hours, eating the freshest fish I have ever tasted, watching local lads play cards, and being gently mocked by the owner for our terrible Spanish. He threw in free churros because, he said, we looked like we needed cheering up. He was not wrong.

That set the tone for the whole fortnight. Our apartment was lovely - clean, airy, a balcony perfect for morning coffee - but the real joy became the deliberate getting lost. We abandoned the beachfront promenade, lovely as it was, and took to the backstreets of Benalmadena Pueblo, the old village proper. Up there, away from the marina crowds, we found a ceramic shop run by a woman whose family had been making tiles for four generations. She let us have a go at painting our own, laughing as I made a right hash of a simple blue flower. It sits on our kitchen windowsill now, slightly wonky, utterly precious.

One afternoon, following a cat down an alleyway - as you do - we discovered a community garden tucked behind a row of houses. Proper allotments, lemon trees heavy with fruit, an ancient bloke in a straw hat who explained, mostly through gestures, that he had been tending his plot since 1968. He gave us a bag of tomatoes that tasted like actual tomatoes, sun-warm and sweet, which we ate with nothing but salt and good bread from a bakery we would never have found otherwise.

The marina had its glitz, the butterfly park its charm, but it was the unplanned moments that stayed with me. Getting lost on purpose became our thing. We found a tiny flamenco bar where locals gathered on Thursday evenings, no tourists in sight, just raw guitar and a woman dancing with her eyes closed. We stumbled upon a hidden cove after taking a wrong path from the lighthouse, spent a whole morning there with nobody else for company except a very bold lizard.

On our last day, driving back to the airport, I deliberately missed the main road again. My partner did not even flinch, just smiled and opened the window. We found a viewpoint we had never seen, all of Benalmadena spread below us, the sea beyond turning gold in the evening light. I thought about that first day, the stress and the stubbornness, and how nearly I had let my pride rob us of everything unexpected that followed. Sometimes the best thing you can do on holiday is admit you are lost, then keep wandering anyway.