I have always believed that the best holidays begin with a small disaster, and our trip to Ciudad Quesada did not disappoint. We had flown into Valencia full of optimism, collected our hire car with the sort of confidence that only comes from never having driven on the right-hand side of the road, and promptly spent forty-five minutes circling the same roundabout near the airport. My partner, ever the navigator, insisted the sat nav was "just finding its feet." I suggested the sat nav had found its feet, taken its shoes off, and settled in for a nap. By the time we spotted the exit for the AP-7, we were already laughing at ourselves, which is perhaps the most useful skill any couple can pack in their suitcase.

The drive south took us through stretches of orange groves that filled the car with a faint, sweet smell every time we opened the windows. We stopped once at a petrol station where the attendant spoke no English and my Spanish extends only to ordering beer and apologising, so our transaction involved a lot of pointing and mutual goodwill. I bought a bag of almonds that I later discovered were salted so heavily they could have preserved a medieval fish. We ate them anyway, out of stubbornness mostly.

Ciudad Quesada itself appeared almost by accident. One moment we were on a dusty road wondering if we had missed a turning, the next we were winding through a little urbanisation of white villas with terracotta roofs, all baking gently in the afternoon sun. Our holiday home sat at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, and I will admit that my first thought was whether we had accidentally booked somewhere in suburban Surrey that had been teleported to Spain. The neatness of it, the potted plants, the sense of orderly calm - it felt almost too tidy for adventure.

That feeling lasted until I tried to unlock the front door. The key turned, but the door refused to budge. I pushed. I pulled. I performed what I can only describe as an aggressive shoulder shimmy. Nothing. My partner tried. The door remained unmoved, as solid and unimpressed as a Spanish cathedral. We were on the verge of calling the property manager when I noticed a small wooden gate to the side of the villa, slightly ajar, leading to the pool area. We slipped through, feeling like incompetent burglars, and found the patio doors unlocked. Our official arrival had been thwarted by a door with principles; our actual arrival was through the back, slightly sweaty, already ridiculous.

But here is where the holiday truly began. That evening, hungry and disoriented from travel, we set out on foot with no plan except to find food. We turned left where we might have turned right, followed a path that narrowed into a track between two walls of bougainvillea, and emerged in a tiny plaza we never found again on any map. An elderly man sat on a bench with a small dog that regarded us with the suspicion we deserved. A bar occupied one corner, nothing more than a few plastic tables and a chalkboard menu, and we sat down because there seemed nothing else to do.

The woman who served us spoke rapid Valencian that washed over us like warm water. We pointed at things. She brought us pan con tomate that tasted of actual tomatoes, not the pale supermarket impersonators we were used to, and little fried fish so fresh they still seemed surprised to be on the plate. We drank beer that tasted of the sea somehow, or perhaps that was just the salt on our lips from the afternoon heat. A group of locals played cards at the next table, arguing with the cheerful violence of old friends. Nobody paid us any attention, which felt like the greatest kindness.

We got lost properly the next morning. Intentionally lost, if that is not a contradiction. We drove without the sat nav, took a road that looked interesting, found ourselves in a landscape of salt flats shimmering white and pink in the early light. Flamingos stood in the shallow water like ornaments someone had forgotten to pack away. We had stumbled upon the Laguna de la Mata without meaning to, without knowing it existed, and we spent an hour walking a trail meant for birdwatchers, neither of us knowing any birds beyond "big pink one" and "small brown one."

Later that week we found a bakery by following our noses down an alley in nearby Rojales, bought bread still warm from the oven, and ate it in a municipal park while watching a game of petanca that we did not understand and could not stop watching. The players were all men of a certain age, dressed with the careful neatness of retired professionals, and they threw their metal balls with the gravity of men conducting foreign policy. We clapped at what seemed appropriate moments. Nobody minded.

I think often now about that stubborn front door, how it forced us to enter differently, to see the villa from its less polished side, to begin our stay already slightly off-script. The whole holiday continued in that spirit. We found a tiny museum of local history in a village whose name I never properly learned, housed in a building that appeared to be someone's front room with the furniture pushed back. The curator, delighted by our accidental presence, showed us agricultural tools whose purposes we could only guess at, and a photograph of a flood from 1987 that had apparently reshaped the entire region. We nodded seriously. We were grateful.

On our final evening we returned to that first bar, or tried to. We walked for twenty minutes, certain of the route, and found only unfamiliar streets and a increasing sense of comic despair. We ate instead at a beachside restaurant in Guardamar, arrived at by pure chance and a wrong turn, and watched the sun lower itself into the Mediterranean with the lazy grandeur of a pensioner getting into a bath. The food was ordinary. The moment was not.

I have been on holidays where everything went according to plan, where doors opened when they should and restaurants had English menus and the sights were exactly as the guidebook promised. I cannot remember them with any clarity. This one I remember: the wrong turns, the salt-almonds, the pink birds, the locked door that started everything. I remember how getting lost in Ciudad Quesada and its surroundings taught me that my best adventures have always been the unplanned ones, the moments when I stopped trying to arrive properly and simply arrived, however I could, through whatever gate happened to be open.