I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up driving the wrong way down a one-way street in Slatine with a hire car full of suitcases and a very patient partner muttering something about Google Maps being "more of a suggestion, really." The street was barely wide enough for a scooter, let alone our overconfident Fiat, and an old chap watering his tomatoes watched us with the weary resignation of someone who has seen this exact scene every summer since 1987.

We were bound for a holiday home on Ciovo Island, technically connected to Trogir by bridge but feeling wonderfully separate once you navigate the coastal road's cheerful chaos. My wrong turn, it turned out, was the first of several happy accidents that defined the whole trip.

Having finally reversed out of my tomato-related humiliation, we found the property down a narrow lane that I would absolutely have missed had I been paying proper attention. The key was in a lockbox, the sort of thing I normally fail at spectacularly, but somehow I managed it on the second attempt which felt like a personal triumph. We stepped inside to find stone floors that stayed deliciously cool even in late afternoon heat, and a terrace that looked directly across the channel to Split. I stood there with a warm Coke from the car, still slightly adrenalised from my driving, and felt that particular holiday sensation of everything suddenly mattering very little.

The next morning I decided to find a bakery for breakfast. This is where my lack of direction became genuinely useful. I took a left where I should have taken a right, then followed a path that narrowed to a track, then to something that was definitely just someone's garden. I was about to retreat when an elderly woman appeared from behind a fig tree and wordlessly handed me two enormous fruits, still warm from the sun. She pointed vaguely downward, and I realised the path continued past her chickens to a tiny cove I could never have found deliberately.

That cove became my secret for the week. No beach bar, no sun loungers, just a few local lads fishing from the rocks and water so clear I could watch fish inspecting my toes with what I choose to believe was curiosity rather than judgment. I went back every morning, always intending to find a different route, always getting lost in slightly different ways, always discovering something I had not meant to find.

One afternoon I wandered too far inland, following what I thought was a shortcut through olive groves. The shortcut became an adventure. I found a chapel crumbling gently into a field of wild lavender, its door hanging open, its interior painted with faded saints who watched me with the same expression as the tomato man. I sat on the step and ate the figs I had brought, feeling pleasantly ridiculous and wonderfully small.

My partner, who has a proper sense of direction and therefore misses these things, found me two hours later by tracking my increasingly apologetic text messages. By then I had also discovered a vineyard selling wine from a garage, a cat that followed me for half a kilometre, and a view of the Kastela Gulf that no guidebook had mentioned because no guidebook would think to send you down a dead-end track between someone's vegetable patch and their septic tank.

That evening we cooked fish from the Slatine harbour, bought from a man who spoke no English but communicated through elaborate hand gestures the exact number of minutes it needed on the grill. We ate on that terrace, watching the lights of Split flicker on, and I admitted that my terrible navigation had somehow delivered the holiday I did not know I wanted.

I still cannot read a map properly. But I am learning that some places reward the lost more than the found.