I have never been particularly good with directions, which is how I found myself driving down what I am fairly certain was a farm track somewhere outside El Palmar, convinced my sat nav had finally developed a sense of humour. The gravel crunching beneath the tyres sounded expensive, and my partner was doing that slow blink he does when questioning his life choices. We had been travelling since four that morning, Manchester to Alicante, then a hire car that smelled faintly of wet dog and optimism. The mishap, if you can call twenty minutes of reversing past orange groves a mishap, came when I confidently turned left at a roundabout that was definitely not on any map I had studied. A man on a scooter watched us with the patient amusement of someone who has seen this many times before.

By the time we actually found the property, down a proper road with actual tarmac and everything, I was ready to kiss the ground. The key collection was straightforward enough, though I managed to drop the fob down a drain grate and had to fish it out with a tent peg from the boot. Not my finest hour, but the bloke in the neighbouring villa gave me a sympathetic thumbs up, so I felt somewhat vindicated.

The first thing that struck me about El Palmar itself was how gloriously unbothered it all seemed. No frantic tourism, no someone trying to flog you a timeshare before you have had a cup of tea. Just low whitewashed houses, the occasional dog sleeping in a doorway, and that particular hush that comes from places where people actually live rather than perform living for visitors. We dumped our bags and did what any sensible person would do after a morning of navigational incompetence: wandered aimlessly with no particular destination in mind.

This is where the magic started, though I did not know it yet. We turned down a lane that looked promising, which is to say it had a cat sitting in it, and within five minutes were completely lost. Properly, delightfully lost. The kind of lost where you stop checking your phone because the map just shows you standing in a blank green rectangle. We passed a smallholding with chickens that eyed us suspiciously, then a wall covered in what I later learned was bougainvillea, though at the time I just thought it was very pink and quite aggressive.

The lane narrowed to a path, then opened suddenly into a tiny plaza with a single bench and a fountain that was doing more dripping than flowing. An old woman was hanging washing from a second-floor window, and she nodded at us as if strangers stumbling into her afternoon were entirely routine. We sat on that bench for a good while, partly because we had no idea which direction to take, partly because there was something deeply restorative about the ordinariness of it all. No guidebook had sent us there. No blog post raved about it. It was simply a place that existed, and we had accidentally found it.

That became the pattern of the week. Deliberately getting ourselves lost became our morning ritual. We would set out with water and a vague sense of adventure, then take every turn that looked unimportant. Down by the old salt flats, we discovered a shack selling fresh fish that had been caught that morning, cooked simply on a griddle and served with lemon and rough bread. The owner spoke no English, my Spanish extends to ordering beer and apologising, and yet we managed through pointing and goodwill. The fish was extraordinary. I have paid three times as much in Manchester for something half as good, and I would not have traded that ramshackle encounter for any Michelin star.

Another wrong turn led us to a stretch of coastline where the beach was not sand but smooth rounded stones, and where a few local lads were fishing with rods that looked older than they were. They showed us how to spot the octopus hiding in the rock pools, changing colour with indignant speed when disturbed. We stayed until the light went golden and the mosquitoes arrived in force, by which point we had collected enough small discoveries to feel rather pleased with ourselves.

There was a bakery we found twice by accident, never by design, where the bread came out at six in the morning and was sold out by eight. The woman who ran it started recognising our hopeless wandering and would wave us in for whatever was left. A tiny agricultural museum, unlocked and unstaffed, where we wandered through exhibits of old farming tools with the slightly guilty feeling of trespassers, though a note on the door said to let ourselves in. A vineyard where the owner was so surprised to see anyone that he insisted on opening a bottle at eleven in the morning, and we sat under a pergola feeling rather decadent and slightly drunk.

The thing about getting properly lost is that it strips away the performance of being a tourist. You cannot curate an experience when you do not know where you are. You cannot check reviews or consult itineraries. You simply have to be present, to accept what comes, to find charm in the unremarkable. I think back to that first afternoon, the panic of the farm track giving way to the peace of that dripping fountain, and I recognise something I rarely admit: my terrible sense of direction, that lifelong source of gentle mockery from friends and family, had actually become a gift. It forced me to slow down, to notice, to receive rather than seek.

We never did learn the proper names of most places we found. The map remained largely blank in those sections. But I can close my eyes and see the light on that stone beach, smell the yeast from that early morning bakery, taste the rough wine under that pergola. These are the souvenirs that matter, the ones no airport shop sells. I arrived in El Palmar frazzled and geographically embarrassed, and I left with something I did not expect: a genuine affection for not knowing exactly where I was, and the quiet joy of finding something wonderful because I was looking for nothing in particular.