I have never been brilliant with directions, so it will surprise no one that I managed to get us lost somewhere between Alicante airport and our holiday let in Murcia. The sat nav had a small meltdown, my other half was doing that patient but slightly twitchy thing, and the kids had already asked "are we there yet" fourteen times before we even left the hire car park. In my defence, the road signs were being deeply unhelpful, and I may have confidently turned onto what I thought was a shortcut but was actually a farm track used exclusively by tractors and the occasional goat.

Forty minutes of increasingly tight turns and some creative language later, we found ourselves in a quiet residential corner of Murcia city, and there it was: a modest little townhouse with cream walls, terracotta roof tiles, and a small balcony that immediately made me think of afternoon beers in the sunshine. The key was in the lockbox exactly as promised, though I did spend an embarrassing amount of time jiggling it while the neighbour watched from her window with what I can only describe as amused sympathy.

Stepping inside for the first time, the coolness hit us like a welcome wave. The place had that lovely lived-in feel, not sterile like a hotel but properly set up for actual humans. The open-plan living area flowed through to a compact kitchen, and someone had thoughtfully left a bowl of lemons on the counter, presumably from the small tree we could see in the courtyard out back. The kids bolted upstairs to claim bedrooms before we had even set down our bags, which led to the inevitable squabble over who got the room with the slightly better view of the pool area.

Ah yes, the pool. Not ours exclusively, but a shared communal number a short wander from the front door. We had a peek over the fence before unpacking, and I will admit to a small internal cheer at the sight of sun loungers and proper shade umbrellas. The water looked genuinely inviting rather than the suspicious green colour I had half-feared after our journey.

My favourite discovery came when I opened the back door properly and found the courtyard. Tiny but perfect, with potted plants, a small table, and one of those built-in barbecues that immediately made me overambitious about our evening plans. I stood there with a cup of tea made from the emergency supplies we had brought, listening to the distant sound of someone practising flamenco guitar a few gardens over, and felt the proper holiday feeling finally land.

The mishap with the directions became our running joke for the rest of the week, naturally. Every time we headed out, someone would ask if I was taking the goat route. But that first evening, as we sat on that little balcony watching the sun drop behind the rooftops and sharing a bottle of surprisingly decent local wine from the supermarket round the corner, I realised something. I am never going to be the person who glides effortlessly from airport to destination. I am the person who takes the scenic route, literally and probably figuratively, and there is something rather nice about that. The lemons, by the way, made excellent gin and tonics.