I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I managed to put the wrong postcode into the hire car sat nav. There we were, trundling through the Murcian countryside, me insisting we were "nearly there" for a solid forty minutes while my other half made that face. You know the one. The "I trusted you with one job" face. Turns out Los Alcazares and some random citrus farm twenty kilometres inland share absolutely nothing in common except my spectacular inability to read a booking confirmation properly.

When we finally corrected course and hit the proper road into town, the first thing that struck me was how gloriously flat everything is. Coming from a place where every journey involves a hill of some description, this felt almost unnerving. Like someone had ironed the landscape. The sat nav, now thoroughly confused by my earlier shenanigans, announced our arrival with the enthusiasm of a person who'd given up on life. But there it was: a little cluster of whitewashed properties, palm trees doing that satisfying tropical sway, and the faintest whiff of something properly Mediterranean in the air.

The property itself was tucked down a street that I'd never have found intentionally. That's the thing about Los Alcazares, I was starting to realise. The whole place rewards the wanderer. The main roads are fine, obviously, but it's the gaps between things where the character lives. We dumped our bags with the relieved exhaustion of people who'd spent far too long in a Renault Clio with broken air conditioning, then did what any sensible person does after a journey gone wrong. We went for a walk with absolutely no plan whatsoever.

This is where I need to be honest with you. I'm normally a planner. I research. I make lists. I have been known to create spreadsheets for day trips. But that first evening, still slightly dizzy from the drive and the heat and the sheer relief of being stationary, I just wandered. And it was brilliant.

We turned left where we should have turned right, following the sound of what turned out to be a local football match in progress. The little ground wasn't on any tourist map I'd ever seen. A handful of locals, a snack van doing proper bocadillos, and a level of passionate shouting that suggested this mattered enormously to about thirty people. We bought beers from a man who spoke no English and communicated entirely through enthusiastic gestures. I understood him perfectly.

The beach revealed itself by accident too. We'd been aiming for what the map called the main promenade, got distracted by a street of surprisingly excellent-looking tapas bars, and emerged through a gap between buildings to find the Mar Menor stretching out like someone had spilled mercury across the horizon. The water was that impossible shallow blue, warm as a bath, with kids still splashing about despite the evening drawing in. No grand entrance, no built-up resort facade. Just... there. Waiting for whoever happened to stumble through.

That first night, we ate grilled sardines at a place the barman from the football ground had mimed towards. It had about six tables, no menu in English, and the owner appeared to be cooking whatever his mate had caught that morning. We understood perhaps every third word of what he told us about the fishing. It didn't matter. Some things translate perfectly well without language.

I went to bed that night with sand in my shoes and a mild sunburn on my shoulders, already plotting how to get lost again tomorrow.