I have never been so grateful to see a toilet roll holder in my entire life. Twelve hours after leaving Gatwick, three hours after a Ryanair flight that felt like it was powered by a lawnmower engine, and twenty minutes after I realised I had been confidently marching through Alicante Airport's car park clutching the wrong set of keys, I finally found our hire car. The keys were in my other jacket pocket, obviously. My partner, bless her, just raised an eyebrow and said nothing. That silence was louder than the flight.

The drive up the AP-7 to Calpe was where things started to shift from chaotic to magical. The sun was doing that thing where it turns everything golden and slightly unreal, and suddenly there were mountains on one side and the Mediterranean winking at us from the other. I may have got a bit emotional. I blame the lack of sleep and the airport sandwich.

We pulled up to the villa just as the light was fading, and that first impression will stay with me forever. The place sat there like a secret, all white walls and terracotta, with palm fronds doing a lazy dance in the warm breeze. Our host, Miguel, emerged from behind a bougainvillea bush with the energy of a man who had been waiting for precisely this moment all day. He was seventy if he was a day, wearing sandals with socks, and immediately launched into a twenty-minute explanation of the pool's filtration system that I understood not one word of. His English was about as good as my Spanish, which is to say we communicated in a beautiful mess of gestures, mispronunciations, and sudden bursts of shared laughter.

"Agua," he kept saying, pointing at everything. "Muy importante." I nodded solemnly. Water. Very important. I still do not know if he meant the pool, the plants, or life in general.

The villa itself smelled of jasmine and something citrusy that I later learned was Miguel's wife's homemade limoncello, which she pressed into our hands within minutes of arrival. Carmen was tiny, fierce, and dressed entirely in purple. She inspected me with the frank assessment of a grandmother at a family gathering, declared my hair "muy British," and then showed us her collection of ceramic frogs. There were forty-seven of them. Each had a name. She introduced us to seventeen before Miguel gently intervened.

That first evening, we sat on the terrace with our luggage still unpacked, drinking something cold and local, watching the last of the light leak out of the sky. A gecko appeared on the wall, and I pointed it out with the excitement of a man who has never seen a lizard before. Which I hadn't, not in the wild. Miguel noticed my enthusiasm and launched into an elaborate pantomime about gecko hunting techniques that involved him flattening himself against the wall and making suction noises with his mouth. Carmen whacked him with a tea towel. He looked delighted.

The mishap with the keys felt like it had happened to someone else by then. Travel does that, doesn't it? It shrinks your disasters into anecdotes before they've even finished happening. I sat there with my limoncello warming in my hands, listening to Miguel attempt to explain the local fish market using only hand gestures and the word "fisho," and I thought about how I nearly let a pocket mishap ruin the tone of an entire day. How often do I do that? Let the small stuff cast shadows over the good stuff?

Carmen caught me staring into my drink and said something rapid and musical to Miguel. He translated, sort of: "She says you think too much. Is British problem." Then he poured me more limoncello, which I took as his prescribed cure.

The frogs croaked. The pool filter hummed its mysterious song. Somewhere in the dark, a gecko was probably suctioning its way up a wall with more grace than I had managed all day. I was in a strange country, with strangers who had already become characters I would remember forever, and I had never felt more at home.