I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong villa. There I was, standing at the door of what I thought was our Roda de Bera place, jiggling the key and muttering about dodgy Spanish locks, while an elderly German couple peered at me through their kitchen window with the kind of alarm usually reserved for escaped zoo animals. Turns out our actual villa was three doors down. I waved an apology and shuffled off, dignity in tatters, already sweating through my shirt at ten in the morning.

The drive from Reus airport had been straightforward enough until I got cocky and ignored the sat nav. "I know a shortcut," I told my partner, who made that noise she always makes, the one that means she is mentally updating her insurance policy. Twenty minutes later we were winding through olive groves on a track barely wide enough for a donkey, the hire car making ominous scraping sounds against overhanging branches. But here is the thing about getting properly lost in Catalonia: it is never entirely wasted time. We stumbled across a tiny stone shrine to Saint Anthony, candles still burning, with a view down to the coast that no guidebook bothers with. My partner photographed it while I stood there feeling smug about my terrible navigation, which she correctly refused to validate.

The villa itself, when I finally located it, sat perched above a cove I had never heard of, the sort of place that does not appear on the glossy brochures. The key actually turned, which felt like a personal victory. We dumped our bags and immediately went wandering without purpose, the best kind of wandering. Down a path that started promisingly and quickly degenerated into something requiring actual balance, we found a fisherman mending nets outside a shack that could not legally qualify as a building. He sold us two cold beers from a crate and pointed at a rock pool where, he claimed through elaborate charades, an octopus lived. We never saw the octopus. We did sit on those rocks for an hour, watching the light change on the water, feeling like we had discovered something despite every indication that locals had been drinking there for generations.

The next morning I attempted to find a supermarket and instead found a bakery operating from someone's garage, the sort of setup that would give British food safety inspectors palpitations. The bread was still warm, crusty and ridiculous, and the woman running it spoke no English but communicated entirely through the universal language of gesturing at cheese until I bought some. I got lost again trying to return and found myself in a square where old men played petanca with the intensity of professional athletes, drinking vermouth at eleven in the morning and arguing about throws that happened in 1987.

By day three we had abandoned any pretence of planning. The sat nav stayed in the glove box. We followed paths that petered out, turned down lanes that became tracks that became suggestions, and consistently found ourselves in places that felt accidentally special. A tiny cala where someone had built stone steps into the rocks for diving, clearly homemade, clearly used for decades. A vineyard where the owner, encountering us trespassing with friendly intent, poured us glasses of young wine and explained nothing and everything in rapid Catalan that we pretended to understand.

What I keep thinking about, now I am home and the tan is fading, is how much I usually structure holidays to death. Every meal booked, every sight ticked off, every minute accounted for. Getting lost in Roda de Bera reminded me that I am not actually very good at spontaneity, that I find uncertainty slightly threatening, that I default to control even when I claim to want adventure. The German couple probably still tell the story of the confused Englishman at their door. I hope they do. It was ridiculous. But it started something, that wrong turn, that kept going for a whole week of wrong turns that turned out to be right ones. I am already planning to get lost again, which I recognise is missing the point entirely, but old habits of control die hard. At least this time I will check the house number before inserting the key.