I have always believed that the best holidays begin with something going slightly wrong, and our trip to Olerdola did not disappoint. We had flown into Barcelona, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of air freshener and regret, and set off towards what I had described to my partner as "a rustic finca in the Catalan countryside, very peaceful, very us." What I had failed to do, in my enthusiasm, was actually check where Olerdola was in relation to anything else. I had simply seen photographs of stone walls and a pool and thought, yes, that'll do nicely.

The mishap came about forty minutes in, when I confidently ignored the satnav and decided to follow a sign for "Olerdola" that pointed up a track barely wide enough for a determined goat. The hire car made a sound like a wounded cat as its underside kissed the ruts. My partner gave me that look, the one that says "I love you but I am currently revising my life choices." We pressed on, because that is what you do when you are too embarrassed to admit defeat. Ten minutes later we emerged onto a dirt ridge with a view of absolutely nowhere familiar, the satnav making increasingly desperate recalculating noises, and a small stone marker indicating we had somehow reached the top of the Serra de l'Ordal.

It was magnificent. Terraced vineyards fell away in every direction, the afternoon light turning everything golden and improbable. We had stumbled, entirely by accident, onto a viewpoint that no guidebook had mentioned, no blog had breathlessly recommended. Just us, a slightly scratched Renault, and the whole of the Penedes wine region spread out like a promise. We sat on the bonnet and shared a warm bottle of water, and I felt that particular joy of being lost that only happens when you are not actually in any danger.

Finding the proper road down took another hour of wrong turns and increasingly specific arguments about whether I had or had not said "turn left at the almond tree." But each wrong turn revealed something unexpected: a crumbling masia with a family of cats sunning themselves on the steps; an elderly man tending vines who waved us towards a track that looked even less promising than the last; a small shrine to Saint Isidore tucked into a hollow where someone had left fresh flowers and an empty wine bottle.

By the time we finally found the proper turning for our holiday let, the sun had begun to set and we were in that peculiar state of tiredness that feels almost like contentment. The finca itself was everything the photographs had promised, low stone buildings arranged around a courtyard, a pool that caught the last light, silence so complete you could hear your own heartbeat. But it was not the pool or the carefully restored beams that stayed with me that first evening. It was the getting there, the accidental discovery of a landscape I had not known to look for.

We unpacked in a daze, made a supper of bread and cheese and tomatoes from a village shop we had passed in our wanderings, and sat outside watching bats trace their patterns against the darkening sky. My partner, who had been quite reasonably cross with me for much of the afternoon, admitted that she would not have chosen to find that ridge on purpose, and that this made it better somehow. I knew exactly what she meant.

The rest of the week brought more deliberate explorations: the Roman ruins at Olerdola proper, which gave the area its name; walks through the national park with its ancient Iberian settlements; the inevitable wine tastings in Sant Sadurni d'Anoia, barely a few miles distant. All of it was lovely, all of it worth doing. But nothing quite matched that first evening of glorious, ridiculous disorientation, when we had been thoroughly, happily lost and found something we were not looking for at all.