We had been on the road for what felt like forty hours, though the satnav swore it was only four and a half from Alicante airport. My partner was driving, I was navigating, and between us we had managed to turn a straightforward journey to our holiday let into something of an accidental tour of rural Murcia. The mishap came just outside Torre-Pacheco, where I confidently directed us down a track that looked, on the map, like a perfectly sensible shortcut. It was not. Within minutes we were bumping along between lemon groves, the hire car making noises that suggested its suspension had never signed up for this sort of treatment. A farmer leaning on a gate watched us pass with the amused patience of someone who had seen this exact scene play out a hundred times before. We waved. He waved back, possibly pityingly.

By the time we found the proper road again, we were both slightly hysterical with laughter and genuinely unsure whether we were still heading in the right direction. But that is the curious thing about getting properly lost. You start noticing things you would otherwise barrel straight past. We found a tiny venta, nothing more than a couple of plastic tables outside a garage, where we stopped for coffee that cost one euro twenty and tasted better than anything from the airport lounge. The woman running it spoke rapid Spanish that we mostly failed to understand, but she seemed delighted by our attempts, and sent us off with directions that involved a lot of pointing at orange trees.

The Country Club itself appeared almost suddenly, tucked behind a low wall and some rather elegant palms. We were still giggling about our detour as we pulled up, slightly dusty, definitely not looking like the sort of guests who belonged anywhere with "Club" in the name. But the place had that rare quality of being smart without being stuffy. The reception area was cool and tiled, with a faint smell of jasmine from somewhere outside, and the woman checking us in did not bat an eyelid at our dishevelled state. She handed over keys and a map of the complex, then paused and circled something with her pen. "The golf course is here," she said, "but if you walk past it, through the gate at the end, there is a path the locals use. It goes nowhere official. Just nice."

That evening, once we had dumped our bags in a villa that was far too spacious for two people who barely cook, we took her advice. The path started promisingly enough, running alongside a fairway where a man in alarming trousers was practising his swing. Then it narrowed, became dusty, and seemed to dissolve into scrubland. We pressed on, mostly out of stubbornness, and found ourselves in a small valley that felt completely removed from the tidy gardens we had left behind. Wild rosemary grew everywhere, and the light had that particular golden quality that makes even ordinary hills look like something from a painting. We sat on a rock and watched a hawk circling above the ridge, neither of us saying much. It was not a dramatic moment, not life-changing, just quietly excellent in a way that planned excursions rarely manage to be.

The next few days, we stopped trying so hard. We abandoned the guidebook suggestions and simply wandered, usually getting lost within twenty minutes. A wrong turn on the way to the supermarket led us to a village fiesta, complete with a brass band and elderly men dancing with surprising enthusiasm. Another accidental detour took us to a beach that did not appear on any of the tourist maps, where a single fisherman sat mending nets and regarded our arrival with mild surprise. We bought squid from him, cooked it badly in our over-equipped kitchen, and ate it on the terrace watching bats emerge at dusk.

I had arrived thinking I wanted a proper holiday itinerary, something to show for my time. Instead I found myself cherishing the unplanned, the slightly scruffy, the moments that could not be replicated because they depended entirely on taking a road that looked wrong and trusting it might lead somewhere interesting. The Country Club was comfortable, certainly, with its pools and its well-kept gardens and its air of gentle respectability. But its real gift to me was that back gate, the unofficial path, the suggestion that the best experiences might lie just beyond the edges of what was officially on offer.

On our last morning, we tried to find that valley path again and failed completely. We wandered for an hour through different scrubland, increasingly unsure of our bearings, eventually emerging near a road we did not recognise. A woman walking her dog directed us back with cheerful efficiency. We never did find that particular valley, and I am rather glad. Some places should remain slightly lost, reachable only by accident, remembered rather than revisited.