I have never been so pleased to see a patio chair in my entire life. Six hours after leaving a drizzly Gatwick, plus a wrong turn at Alicante airport that had me circling the same roundabout three times while my phone insisted I was "arriving at destination," I finally pulled up to a modest little townhouse in San Pedro del Pinatar. The key safe code worked first time, which felt like a minor miracle, and then I stepped through to the back terrace and promptly sat down on said plastic chair for a solid ten minutes without moving. Just breathing. Possibly making small whimpering noises of relief.

The mishap, because there always is one with me, had happened about two hours earlier. In my wisdom, I'd decided to stop at a supermarket in Torrevieja for supplies. "Just a few bits," I told myself. Well, I got the bits. I also got back to the car, loaded everything up, settled into the driver's seat, and reached for my sunglasses. Not there. Checked the door pocket. Nope. Under the seat? Nothing. I spent twenty minutes in blazing heat conducting what can only be described as a forensic search of a Ford Fiesta, growing increasingly theatrical in my gestures, before realising with perfect clarity that I was wearing them. On my head. They had been there throughout. A woman with a trolley gave me a look I shall not forget in a hurry.

This set the tone, really. I am not, it turns out, a person who travels with dignity. But San Pedro del Pinatar, bless it, does not seem to demand any.

The first evening, I did nothing ambitious whatsoever. I unpacked badly, leaving clothes in roughly the configuration they'd arrived in, and wandered down to the salt flats at Lo Pagan as the light went soft. The pink-tinged water, the herons standing about with that particular patience birds have, the smell of salt and warm mud, it all felt slightly unreal after the M25 and the Ryanair queue. I stood on the little wooden walkway and watched a man fishing with a rod that looked older than me. He caught nothing while I watched. He seemed perfectly content. I found this both baffling and admirable.

Back at the house, I made a supper of bread, cheese, and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, which always throws me after English winter produce. I ate on the terrace with a beer from the fridge, watching the last light fade and listening to someone, somewhere, having a perfectly reasonable conversation in Spanish that I understood not a word of. A gecko appeared on the wall, froze, regarded me with what I chose to interpret as companionable acceptance, and darted off.

I had plans, of course. The Mar Menor was minutes away, those famously warm shallow waters everyone talks about. The local fish restaurants, the morning market, perhaps a cycle along the promenade. All of that would come. But that first night, still slightly vibrating from motorway miles and the lingering embarrassment of the sunglasses incident, I simply sat. The air smelled of jasmine and distant cooking. A dog barked somewhere, was answered by another, and then both apparently reached agreement and stopped.

I thought about how I rush through most of my life, how I treat arrival as merely the end of a process rather than something worth noticing in itself. Here, the journey had been the usual minor chaos, but the arriving, the actual being-there, felt different. Slower. The plastic chair, the gecko, the salt smell, the warm beer. Small things, but they had waited for me. I had only to notice them.

Tomorrow I would swim, explore, probably get lost again. Tonight, I sat until the mosquitoes found me, then retreated indoors with the satisfied exhaustion of someone who has, against modest odds, made it to exactly where they meant to be.