I had convinced myself that driving from Split airport to Ciovo Arbanija would be straightforward. "It's basically one road," I told my partner, waving my phone about with the confidence of a man who had once successfully navigated a Tesco car park. Forty minutes later, we were circling a roundabout near Trogir for the third time, watching the same confused German cyclist go past, while I maintained that this was "definitely the scenic route." The scenic route, it turned out, was a dead end by a marina full of men who looked like they had never been lost in their lives.

We finally found our holiday let down a narrow lane that my car barely fit through, scraping past an olive tree that has probably seen worse. The property sat perched above a small pebble cove, all white walls and terracotta roof, with bougainvillea doing its best to take over the balcony. I stepped out of the car, stretched my legs, and promptly walked into a low-hanging branch of fig. Welcome to Dalmatia.

The next morning I woke early, full of that peculiar British determination to turn a holiday into a fitness regime. I had packed walking boots, proper socks, even one of those hats with a flap for your neck. My partner looked at me with the exhausted expression of someone who had seen this before. "There's a path along the coast to Slatine," I announced, reading from a crumpled printout. "Five miles. Stunning views."

The first hour was genuinely glorious. The path clung to rocky coastline, pine trees scenting the air, the Adriatic doing that impossible blue thing on my right. I felt smug. This was the life. No more soggy Sunday strolls in the Peak District, eating a flapjack in horizontal rain. I had cracked it. I had found the walking weather that Britain had been hiding from me my entire life.

Then the bura hit.

For the uninitiated, the bura is a wind that comes down from the mountains with what I can only describe as personal vendetta. One moment I was admiring a fishing boat; the next I was clinging to a rock like a limpet, my sensible hat cartwheeling into a gorse bush, never to be seen again. The sky, which had been cloudless, filled with low grey scudding clouds that looked exactly like home. I checked my weather app with the obsessive frequency of a man checking his bank balance before payday. Twelve degrees, it claimed. Felt like being slapped with a wet fish by an angry giant.

We turned back. There is no shame in retreat, I told myself, while secretly feeling there was quite a lot of shame in retreat. The path that had seemed so gentle became a battleground of flying pine needles and dust. My partner, sensibly dressed in a light cardigan, looked at me in my abandoned-lynch-mob-instructor gear and raised an eyebrow.

The following days developed a pattern. I would wake, check the wind, optimistically pack my boots, and then spend the morning reading on the terrace while the bura rattled the shutters. In the afternoons, when it sometimes dropped, we would attempt shorter walks - down to the little harbour at Arbanija, where old men played cards and ignored the weather entirely, or up through the olive groves behind the village, where the wind was broken enough to feel almost pleasant.

I had not expected to spend my Croatian holiday thinking quite so much about the weather. There is something humbling about travelling six hundred miles to find the same meteorological stubbornness that haunts British camping trips. On our fourth day, we managed a proper walk to Okrug Gornji, cutting inland where the hills sheltered us, emerging to find the sea churned to grey-green, completely different from the placid pool I had imagined swimming in daily. I stood on the shore, boots muddy from a path that had briefly turned to stream, and laughed. The British walking holiday, it seemed, had followed me here like a loyal and slightly damp dog.

The locals, of course, were unbothered. They sat in cafes, drank their coffee, talked about football. A man in the konoba where we ate grilled sardines told me the bura would pass. "Tomorrow, maybe," he said, with the vagueness of someone who has lived with capricious weather long enough to stop making promises. He was right, eventually. On our second-to-last day, the wind dropped, the sea flattened to glass, and I finally got my coastal walk in the sunshine, ending at a beach bar where I drank a beer with the satisfaction of someone who had definitely earned it, even if the earning had taken most of the week.

I came home with dusty boots, one less hat, and a new appreciation for the British habit of talking constantly about the weather. Some things, it turns out, are universal. The walking was glorious when it happened. The waiting was part of it too. I would go back tomorrow, though I might pack a better waterproof.