I have never been so relieved to see a suitcase on the wrong carousel in my entire life. There we were, my partner Dave and I, standing at Palma airport watching everyone else's holiday dreams glide past while ours apparently fancied a tour of the terminal. Forty-five minutes of increasingly frantic pacing later, a bloke in a high-vis vest wheeled it out from behind a curtain with the air of someone presenting a game show prize. "Bienvenidos a Mallorca," I muttered, though I did laugh eventually. Mostly.

The drive to Cala Ratjada took about ninety minutes, which I spent clutching the hire car door and providing entirely unwanted commentary on Spanish driving habits. Dave, who had nobly volunteered for the left-hand-side-of-the-road challenge, developed a twitch in his left eye that would persist for most of the week. We wound through the Serra de Llevant, past almond groves and that particular honey-coloured stone you only seem to get in this corner of the world, and gradually the tension began to dissolve. By the time we spotted the sea glittering beyond the pine trees, I had almost forgiven the suitcase incident.

Elionor sits on a quiet residential street a few minutes from the harbour, and our first encounter was with Pep, the keyholder, who materialised from a neighbouring garden with a small dog tucked under one arm and what I can only describe as theatrical suspicion. He examined our booking confirmation as though checking for forged banknotes, then broke into the most enormous grin. "English! You will want the big fridge for the beer, yes?" I started to protest that we were more sophisticated than that, then remembered we had indeed stopped for San Miguel at a petrol station not twenty minutes prior. "The big fridge," I confirmed, with what dignity I could muster.

The apartment itself was immediately, overwhelmingly Spanish in that wonderful way that makes you feel you have stepped into someone's actual life rather than a corporate holiday experience. Terracotta tiles, white walls, wooden shutters that actually functioned. The balcony overlooked a garden where bougainvillea was attempting to consume a lemon tree, and beyond that, a glimpse of the sea that made me actually say "oh" out loud. Dave, who had been fiddling with the air conditioning, emerged to find me standing there like a lemon myself, just staring.

Our first evening, we wandered down to the harbour for what we intended to be a quick drink. This was before we met Toni, who ran a tiny bar with approximately four stools and opinions on everything. He had lived in Cala Ratjada his entire life, he told us, pouring something local and amber-coloured without asking, and he remembered when the British came for the fishing, not the sunbeds. "Now you come for the Instagram," he said, with a shrug that managed to be neither accusatory nor approving. We stayed for three hours, learning about his brother's boat and his mother's paella and why the Germans always want the same table. He refused payment for the second round, which Dave later observed was probably a sophisticated business strategy, but I prefer to think was simply Toni being Toni.

Walking back in the warm dark, slightly unsteady on the unfamiliar cobbles, I found myself thinking about how quickly a place can shift from foreign to familiar. That morning I had been a stressed woman arguing with an airline representative. Now I was someone who knew that Toni's brother was called Miquel and that the best time to buy fish was Tuesday. The suitcase mishap, the driving terror, the initial awkwardness with Pep - they had all become part of the texture of the thing, little scratches on the surface that let the proper experience seep through.

We fell asleep with the shutters open and the sound of someone practising flamenco guitar badly but enthusiastically from a nearby balcony. I remember thinking, just before consciousness slipped away, that this was already enough holiday for me, that if the rest of the week brought nothing but this feeling, I would consider it time well spent. The guitar faltered, restarted, found its rhythm briefly, then collapsed again into cheerful chaos. I smiled in the darkness and let it carry me under.