I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up circling the same orange grove three times before finding our holiday let in Llauri. The sat nav had given up on me somewhere near Alzira, and my partner was doing that patient breathing thing he does when he is trying not to laugh. We had been driving from Valencia Airport for the best part of an hour, winding through ribbon roads and past fields of tiger nuts, and I was absolutely convinced we had driven into a painting rather than an actual town.

The mishap came when I finally spotted what I thought was our lane, turned too sharply, and scraped the hire car against a low stone wall covered in bougainvillea. Not hard, mind you, just enough to send a shower of pink petals cascading over the bonnet like we had won some sort of floral motorsport event. My partner got out to assess the damage, which was essentially none, while I sat there pretending this had been my plan all along. A local man walking his dog paused to watch, offered a sympathetic shrug, and carried on. I chose to interpret this as solidarity.

Llauri itself, when we actually found it, turned out to be the sort of place you would never stumble upon deliberately. It sits in the Ribera Baixa region, surrounded by rice paddies and citrus farms, with the kind of sleepy main square that makes you check your watch to see if time has actually stopped. Our holiday home was a traditional Valencian townhouse with shuttered windows and a tiny balcony that looked directly into a neighbour's pigeon loft. The owner had left us a bottle of horchata and some fartons, which I initially thought was a wind-up until I remembered these sweet, elongated pastries are a genuine local delicacy. We sat on the terrace that evening, dipping fartons into horchata like locals, watching the pigeons come home to roost and feeling rather pleased with ourselves.

The real magic began the next morning when I insisted on exploring without my phone. We got lost almost immediately, which was precisely the point. A wrong turn down a dirt track led us to a crumbling masia where an elderly woman was selling home-grown tomatoes and honey from a card table. She spoke rapid Valencian that I could not follow, but through pointing and smiling we ended up with more produce than we could carry and an impromptu lesson in which tomatoes were best for paella. Another accidental detour took us to a stretch of the Xuquer river where locals were fishing with simple bamboo rods, the water so still it reflected the reeds like glass.

My favourite discovery came on our third day. We had set out for the beach at Cullera, missed the turning, and found ourselves in a village called Favara where a tiny bar was serving the most extraordinary all-i-pebre, an eel stew I would never have ordered by choice but could not stop eating once it arrived. The barman explained his grandfather had been making it the same way since the 1950s, and somehow we stayed for three hours, chatting in broken Spanish and drinking Valencian beer that tasted of sunshine and good decisions.

Getting lost in Llauri taught me something I keep forgetting in my ordinary life. The best moments are rarely the ones you plan with military precision, the restaurants with five-star reviews, the sights everyone photographs from identical angles. They are the pigeon lofts and the crumbling farmhouses, the unexpected eel stew, the pink petals scattered across a hire car bonnet like nature's own forgiveness. I am still terrible with directions, and I hope I always will be.