I have never been so happy to see a set of patio furniture in my entire life. Three hours, two wrong motorways, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted Rojales was "in Valencia city centre" had left me, my wife, and two increasingly feral children ready to abandon the hire car in a ditch and walk the rest of the way. Turns out Rojales is not in Valencia city centre. Turns out it is a good forty minutes south, tucked into the Costa Blanca, surrounded by orange groves and the faint smell of someone's barbecue. The sat nav had done us dirty, and I had done us dirtier by trusting it without a backup map. Old school, my father would have said. Should have brought an atlas.

The mishap that really cemented the journey, though, happened at a petrol station somewhere near Alicante. I had pulled in, triumphant at finding fuel, and promptly filled the tank with diesel. Petrol car. The look on the attendant's face said everything my wife was too exhausted to verbalise. Two hours and one very expensive drainage later, we limped into Rojales as the sun dipped low, painting everything that warm Spanish gold that makes you forgive almost anything. Almost.

The villa itself sat behind a modest wall, nothing flashy, which immediately suited me. I am suspicious of holiday properties that try too hard. This one had the comfortable look of somewhere actually lived in, not staged for an estate agent's photo. Terracotta pots with geraniums flanking the door. A small pool glinting in the last light, the water still from the day's heat. The children made identical noises of animal relief and sprinted for the water, shoes still on, my protests lost to the warm evening air.

Inside, the place smelled of clean linen and something faintly lemony. The kitchen was compact but properly equipped, not one of those holiday rentals where you open a drawer to find a single bent fork and a tin opener from 1973. I found actual sharp knives. A kettle that boiled in reasonable time. These things matter when you have driven through your own incompetence to get somewhere. My wife opened the patio doors and the scent of jasmine rolled in from somewhere beyond the garden wall. She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and said nothing about the diesel incident. This was her peace offering, and I accepted it gratefully.

The first evening, we did nothing ambitious. Swimming costumes dried on the terrace railing. I opened a bottle of local wine that cost less than a London coffee and tasted of proper sunshine. The children discovered the outdoor shower and treated it like a theme park attraction. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked at nothing, and someone played flamenco guitar badly but enthusiastically. It was perfect precisely because it asked nothing of us.

I sat there, slightly sun-pinked, slightly wine-happy, watching my daughter teach herself to float in the pool, and had one of those small moments of clarity that holidays sometimes permit. The diesel disaster, the sat nav screaming, the hours of tension in the car, they had all dissolved into this. The simple, unglamorous pleasure of being somewhere else, together, with nothing required except presence. I am not good at slowing down. My default speed is anxious multitasking. But something about the particular slowness of that first evening, the weight of the heat, the cheap wine, the children's uncomplicated joy, it loosened something.

We ate bread and cheese and tomatoes from a shop in the village that morning, before we even found the villa properly. Simple food, room temperature, eaten with fingers. The children were too tired to complain about the lack of chicken nuggets. My wife and I talked about nothing important for the first time in months.

That is what I remember most about arriving. Not the journey, though I suspect I will never live down the diesel. Not the villa's specific features, lovely as they were. The feeling of having accidentally arrived exactly where we needed to be, frayed edges and all, and finding it was enough. More than enough, actually. The guitar player had moved on to something even worse, and I smiled into my wine, content to sit with my own small foolishness and the particular grace of a holiday that begins with a mess and ends, at least for that first evening, in something like peace.