I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I confidently strode up to the wrong hire car in Valencia airport and spent a solid five minutes trying to wedge my suitcase into a boot that clearly was not mine. The actual owner appeared, remarkably polite for someone whose vehicle I was actively burgling, and I shuffled off to find my distinctly less flashy Fiat Panda with the grace of a man who had just forgotten his own postcode.

The drive to Bonalba took about half an hour, which I managed to stretch to forty-five minutes through a combination of roundabout confusion and an admirable refusal to accept that my phone's GPS might actually know better than my gut instinct. Somewhere near Mutxamel I took what I firmly believed was a shortcut and found myself in a landscape of orange groves and suspicious dogs, the kind of rural dead end where you half expect a weathered local to emerge and tell you the castle is haunted.

I arrived at the Bonalba complex slightly frazzled, slightly sunburned through the driver's window, and deeply ready for a beer. The place itself sprawls across a hillside with the kind of casual Mediterranean confidence that makes British architecture look permanently apologetic. My apartment had a terrace overlooking the golf course, which I mention not because I play golf - I do not, my swing resembles a man fighting off wasps - but because the green undulating expanse made an excellent backdrop for evening gin and tonics.

The real magic, though, happened when I stopped trying to be clever about navigation. On my second morning, attempting what I imagined was a straightforward walk to the nearby supermarket, I took a wrong turning that deposited me in a pocket of countryside I would never have found deliberately. A dirt track led past an abandoned farmhouse where swallows nested in the broken roof beams, and suddenly I was in a small valley of almond trees, the ground scattered with shells from the previous harvest. No signposts, no other walkers, just the occasional distant thwack of a golf ball from somewhere over the ridge to remind me civilisation persisted.

I got properly lost twice more that week, each time surrendering to the wrong path with what I eventually recognised as the holidaymaker's equivalent of religious faith. Down a lane I never identified on any map, I stumbled into a tiny bar where an elderly man served me horchata and fartons without speaking a word of English, and we communicated through the international language of appreciative nodding. Another accidental detour took me to a viewpoint above Campello where local teenagers were diving from rocks into water so clear it seemed almost theatrical.

The Bonalba complex itself became my base rather than my destination, a place to return with dusty shoes and stories that improved slightly with each retelling. I never did learn the proper route to that supermarket, and on my final day I embraced this entirely, setting out deliberately without my phone and finding yet another wrong turning that led to a lemon grove where an old woman showed me how to select the ripe fruit by smell alone.

Back at the airport, returning my undamaged Fiat Panda with something approaching competence, I realised the mishaps I had dreaded had become the entire point. The wrong car, the wrong turns, the wrong everything - they had delivered me to places no deliberate plan could have reached. I boarded my flight smelling faintly of citrus and already plotting how to get lost somewhere else entirely.