I have never been so relieved to see a concrete water park in all my life. There we were, three hours after landing at Almeria, still trundling around Roquetas de Mar in a hire car that smelled faintly of pine air freshener and regret. My phone had died somewhere near the A7, taking Google Maps with it, and my partner was doing that thing where he goes very quiet and grips the steering wheel like it owes him money.

The mishap, if you can call a complete navigational collapse a mishap, had started innocently enough. I had jotted down directions on the back of a boarding pass. "Left at the roundabout with the palm tree," I had written, as if there is only one palm tree in Andalusia. Reader, there are thousands. We had done three complete circuits of what felt like the same roundabout, each time spotting a different palm tree and convincing ourselves this was progress.

By the time we stumbled upon the Aguadulce water park, we were properly lost. Sweaty, bickering, hungry. But something about seeing those looping slides and hearing distant shrieks of children made us laugh. We pulled over, bought terrible coffee from a vending machine, and decided to embrace the chaos.

That decision changed everything.

We found our holiday home eventually, of course. A little later than planned, with considerably less dignity, but we found it. The NOVASOL property sat in a quiet residential pocket, all white walls and terracotta roofs, with a small pool that caught the afternoon sun. It was lovely. But honestly? The getting lost was better.

The next morning, armed with nothing but a paper map from the airport and a stubborn refusal to use technology, we set out to get lost on purpose. We headed inland, away from the beachfront promenade with its orderly rows of sun loungers. Within ten minutes, we were somewhere else entirely.

A dirt track led us to a lemon grove. Actual lemons, yellow and fat, hanging over a dry stone wall. An old man in a flat cap was pruning trees and waved us through with a gesture so casual it felt like an invitation into a secret. We walked until the track petered out at a ramshackle farm building where a woman sold honey from her own hives. She spoke no English, we spoke barely any Spanish, but we managed to communicate through the universal language of pointing at jars and smiling too much. The honey tasted of rosemary and something else, something we could not name.

Another afternoon, we took a wrong turning near the port and ended up in a neighbourhood of tiny houses, each front door painted a different colour. Washing flapped between balconies. An elderly woman sat on a plastic chair outside her green door, shelling almonds into a bowl. She nodded at us as if strangers wandering past her front step were perfectly ordinary. Perhaps they were.

We found a beach that afternoon too, though not the one everyone goes to. This one was shingle and silence, a few fishing boats pulled up at one end, a man mending nets with movements so practised they looked like meditation. No sun loungers, no beach bars, no English breakfast menus laminated in three languages. Just the sea and the heat and the feeling that we had accidentally trespassed into something authentic.

I have thought about that week a lot since returning to grey skies and reliable broadband. There is something about getting lost that strips away the performance of being a tourist. You cannot curate an experience when you do not know where you are. You cannot review a lemon grove on TripAdvisor, or rate the honey woman's hospitality out of five stars. You simply have to be there, slightly uncomfortable, completely unplanned, alive to whatever turns up.

Our last accidental discovery came on the final evening. We had set out for what we thought was a restaurant recommendation from a neighbour, took a left that should have been a right, and found ourselves in a plaza we had never seen before. Children kicked a football beneath orange trees. A bar had set up tables outside, and an ancient television showed a football match nobody was watching. We ordered beer and tapas, understood perhaps one word in ten of the conversation at the next table, and watched the light fade over rooftops we would never see again.

I still have the jar of honey. It sits in my kitchen cupboard, nearly empty now, and every time I spoon it into yoghurt I remember that we found it because we were terrible at following directions. Some people plan meticulously, research extensively, tick off every recommended sight. I used to be one of them. Roquetas de Mar taught me that the best thing you can pack for a holiday is a willingness to go wrong, to miss your turning, to end up somewhere the guidebooks have never heard of.

Next time, I might not even write anything on a boarding pass. I might just drive and see what happens. Though perhaps I will charge my phone first. There is embracing chaos, and then there is three hours of concrete water parks. Even I have my limits.