I have never been a natural navigator, and my first trip to Miami Platja in Catalonia proved it beyond all doubt. We had flown into Reus, collected our hire car with that misplaced confidence you get from a full English at Gatwick and three hours' sleep, and set off south with the sunroof open and my partner reading directions from a screenshot. Somewhere between Cambrils and the coast, I took what I firmly believed was a shortcut. It was not a shortcut. It was a farm track that deposited us in an olive grove, where a very old man with a very old dog watched us perform a seventeen-point turn without a flicker of surprise. I waved with desperate cheerfulness. He did not wave back.

By the time we found our holiday home, I had seen more of rural Tarragona than I ever intended. The property sat down a sandy lane just back from the beach, all terracotta tiles and white walls and a terrace that looked like it had been waiting for someone to spill sangria on it. I was ready to collapse with a cold drink and never move again. But the thing about getting properly lost is that it shakes something loose. You stop trusting the map. You start looking around.

The next morning, still smarting from my navigational humiliation, I decided to walk to the beach without my phone. This was less brave than stupid, but it changed everything. I missed the main turn entirely and found myself on a dirt path between two pine groves, the kind of path that looks like it leads nowhere until suddenly it does. The path opened onto a tiny cove, barely thirty metres of shingle, where a local woman sat fishing with a hand line and three cats waited with professional patience. She nodded at me. I nodded back. We did not speak. I sat on a rock and watched her pull up three small fish in twenty minutes, each one inspected and either kept or tossed back with a flick of her wrist. The cats ate the rejects. It was the most peaceful hour of my entire holiday, and I would never have found it deliberately.

That set the pattern. We abandoned the car for days at a time. We walked the coastal paths that thread between Miami Platja and the smaller developments, the ones marked with paint dots on rocks that you only notice when you are not looking for them. One afternoon, hungry and slightly sun-drunk, we followed our noses down an unmarked lane behind the main road and discovered a converted farmhouse serving lunch to maybe six tables. The owner made his own embutidos, cured meats hanging in a back room you could see from the terrace. We ate botifarra amb mongetes, white beans and thick Catalan sausage, with bread that had been baked that morning and wine from a local cooperative that cost less than a London pint. We stayed three hours. There was no menu in English. We pointed and guessed and were never disappointed.

My favourite discovery came from my worst mistake. I had set out for what I thought was the weekly market at Cambrils, took another wrong turning, and ended up in the village of Montbrio del Camp. I stopped for directions at a bar where three men were playing cards with the intensity of chess grandmasters. One of them, without looking up from his hand, told me the market was yesterday and that I should instead visit the ermita on the hill above the village. I did, mostly because I was too embarrassed to admit I had no idea what an ermita was. It was a tiny hermitage, locked and plain, with views across the Baix Camp plain to the sea. I sat on the step and watched swallows darting through the afternoon heat. A woman walking her dog stopped to explain, in slow Catalan that I mostly understood through gesture, that her grandmother had been married there in 1953. She showed me a photograph on her phone. The same door, the same step, a young woman in white who looked like her.

I never did make it to that market. I saw less of the famous Costa Daurada than I planned, missed several recommended restaurants, and spent one memorable evening completely unable to find our holiday home in the dark, circling the same roundabout three times while my partner laughed so hard she could not read the house number. But I found something better than the itinerary I had carefully researched. I found the pleasure of not knowing where I was going, of trusting that a path might lead somewhere worth being, of accepting that the wrong turn was sometimes the right one. The old man in the olive grove had seen it all before. I am only sorry I did not stop to ask him where to go. He would probably have sent me somewhere I never expected, which would have been exactly the point.