I have never been so pleased to see a Tesco bag in my life, and that is not a sentence I thought I would ever write. There we were, three hours into our drive from Reus Airport, convinced we had mastered the Spanish motorway system, when the sat nav cheerfully announced we had arrived at Miami Playa. The only problem was that we were parked outside a petrol station looking at a man washing his windscreen. My wife gave me that look. You know the one. The look that says, "You promised this year would be different from the Lanzarote debacle."

Turns out I had written down the wrong postcode on a napkin at Bristol Airport. The napkin had also been used to wrap half a croissant. I am not a details person. This is something I am working on, mostly at my wife's suggestion.

We found the proper address eventually, down a quiet residential street where the houses all looked reassuringly like the photos. Our holiday home was one of those pleasant whitewashed places with terracotta roof tiles and a small garden that someone had made a decent effort with. Potted palms, a bit of lavender, the works. The key was in a lockbox, which I opened with the code after only four attempts. Progress.

The first thing that hit me was the smell of clean linen and something else, something I could not place. My daughter announced it was the smell of "foreignness," which is not a word but I knew what she meant. The kitchen was immediately the centre of operations because that is how holidays work with children. Within minutes there were crisps open on the counter and someone had worked out the WiFi password. I stood by the sliding doors looking at the terrace, thinking that this was exactly the sort of simple, unpretentious place we needed.

The terrace became my favourite spot that first evening. Nothing fancy, just a plastic table and chairs with slightly wobbly legs, a portable barbecue in the corner, and enough space for the kids to kick a ball around without breaking anything important. I opened a bottle of Estrella from the fridge, which I had bought at a supermarket that seemed to sell nothing but ham and very large bottles of water. The beer was cold and tasted of relief.

We walked to the beach the next morning, which took about fifteen minutes at the pace of a ten-year-old who had forgotten her flip-flops. The sand at Miami Playa is that proper Mediterranean gold, not the disappointing pebble affairs you get further north. The water was still a bit brisk in April, but the kids went in anyway because children are fundamentally immune to temperature. I paddled like a sensible adult and got my shorts wet when a wave caught me off guard. My wife laughed for a solid minute. I deserved it.

What I liked about that first day was the lack of anything to do except be there. No excursions to plan, no restaurants to research, no pressure to make it the Best Holiday Ever. We bought bread and cheese from a small shop near the beach, ate lunch on that wobbly terrace, and the kids disappeared into a card game that seemed to involve a lot of shouting. I read three pages of a novel and fell asleep in the sun. My shoulder still bears the mark of that overconfidence.

By evening I had worked out the barbecue, more or less, and we sat out until it got properly dark, which happens later than you expect. Someone was cooking garlic prawns a few gardens over. A dog barked intermittently with no particular urgency. My daughter asked if we could stay forever, which is the highest praise she knows.

I thought about that napkin in the bin at Reus, the wrong postcode, the petrol station confusion. Sometimes the mishaps are what get you to the right place in the end. Not that I will tell my wife I said that. Some things are better left as quiet personal revelations, preferably accompanied by a cold beer and the sound of children who are not currently arguing.