I have never been one to read a map properly, which is how I found myself reversing down a one-way lane in Alella, Catalonia, with a hire car the size of a small boat and a satnav that had apparently given up on me entirely. The mishap? I had followed a sign for "celler" thinking it meant cellar, which it does, but in this case it meant a wine cellar tucked halfway up a hillside with a road built for goats and determined tractors. Three-point turns became twelve-point turns. A local chap walking his dog just stood there watching, not unkindly, with the patient expression of someone who has seen this exact scene a hundred times before.

We were staying in a proper Catalan farmhouse, the sort with terracotta floors that stay cool even when the sun is doing its worst and shutters that clatter satisfyingly in the evening breeze. But I am getting ahead of myself. First I had to get us there, which meant admitting defeat to that same dog walker and accepting directions in a mixture of Catalan and pointing. He sent me down what I am fairly certain was a footpath, past a lemon tree heavy with fruit that brushed the roof of the car, and suddenly there it was. Hidden, completely, from the road I was meant to be on.

That wrong turn became the making of the whole trip.

The farmhouse itself was grander than I expected, with a pool that looked out over vineyards rolling down to the sea. But I am not here to bang on about the accommodation, lovely as it was. What stuck with me was what happened when I stopped trying to plan anything at all. The morning after my navigational humiliation, I set off with nothing but walking shoes and a water bottle, determined to get properly lost. Within ten minutes I had achieved this goal admirably.

I found a bakery in what I later learned was the old part of Alella village, not the bit near the main road that everyone sees first. The woman running it spoke no English and my Spanish extends to ordering beer and apologising, which turned out to be sufficient. She sold me something I still cannot name, a pastry filled with custard and pine nuts, warm from the oven. I ate it on a bench outside a church that looked like it had been there since before anyone thought to write things down. A group of old men played cards at a table nearby, completely ignoring me, which felt like the highest compliment.

Wandering further, or perhaps I should say blundering further, I came across a tiny wine cooperative with a handwritten sign and no website. The man inside, Josep, let me taste his family's garnacha blanca straight from the tank. It was nothing like the polished wines from the bigger bodegas. It was awkward, interesting, alive. I bought two bottles and carried them like treasure, though one did not survive the walk back intact. The pavement outside a shuttered estate agent in a village I cannot now identify has probably never been so well irrigated.

The coast was meant to be the draw, and it is lovely enough, but I kept finding myself inland, up lanes that petered out into dirt tracks, discovering viewpoints where the only other living creature was a hawk circling below me. One afternoon I followed a stream bed until it opened into a small gorge with fig trees growing wild, the fruit split open and sweet enough to attract wasps and one very committed bee. I sat on a rock and ate three, the juice sticky on my fingers, thinking about absolutely nothing useful at all.

There is something particular about getting lost in a place where the hills hide everything from view until you are right upon it. No grand vistas stretching for miles, just sudden revelations. A hidden chapel with a door left unlocked. An olive grove where someone had left a rusted plough from another century as if they might need it again next Tuesday. A swimming hole in a river I never found a second time, though I tried, which is probably the point.

I have always been a bit smug about my planning skills, my spreadsheets, my carefully researched restaurant bookings. This trip cured me, or at least gave me pause. The best meal I had was at a bar I stumbled into because I needed the loo, where they were grilling sardines on a terrace and the owner just brought me whatever was ready. The best afternoon involved no sights at all, just a book and the shade of an almond tree I discovered by following a cat.

On the last day I tried to find that bakery again, the one with the unnamed pastry. I failed, naturally. The lanes all looked different in morning light, or perhaps I had never really seen them properly in the first place. I did find another bakery, different woman, different pastry, equally good. I ate it on a different bench, watched different old men play cards, and felt absolutely fine about it.

Some places reward the prepared traveller. Alella, I think, rewards the one who cannot follow instructions, who takes the road that looks too small to be correct, who accepts that being slightly confused is not the same as being unhappy. I left with stained clothes, one intact bottle of wine, and the strong suspicion that I had barely scratched the surface of what those hills were hiding. I will be back, with no map, and almost certainly with no plan.