I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I managed to get my suitcase stuck in the Split Airport car hire door. There I was, tugging at a wheelie bag that had developed an unexpected attachment to a rubber seal, while a queue of impatient Croatians tapped their feet behind me. My partner pretended not to know me. A lovely man in a NOVASOL polo eventually freed it with one firm yank, handed it back without a word, and I shuffled off to find our Fiat like a dog that's been caught eating a slipper.

The drive down the coastal road from Split to Baska Voda was meant to take an hour. It took two and a half, entirely because I insisted we follow a sign that said "scenic route" in what I now believe was deliberate mischief by local planners. The road narrowed, climbed, and suddenly we were threading through olive groves with views that made me gasp and my partner grip the door handle. We passed a tiny stone chapel with a rusted bell, no name, no tourists, just a local woman hanging laundry who waved as if Americans got lost there daily. We waved back like the polite British fools we are.

By the time we found our apartment in Baska Voda, I was too frazzled to appreciate much beyond the air conditioning and a cold beer from the fridge. The place was lovely, mind you - proper Dalmatian stone, terracotta tiles, a balcony that smelled of pine from the trees below. But I was still recovering from my navigational shame.

The real magic started the next morning when I decided, with the confidence of the truly ignorant, to find a shortcut to the beach. I turned left where I should have turned right, up a steep lane between houses that grew progressively more ancient and less interested in visitors. The tarmac gave way to gravel, then to something that was basically two ruts with herbs growing between them. I passed a cat that looked at me with undisguised contempt. I passed a garage where three old men played cards in near-total silence, pausing only to track my progress with the kind of stare usually reserved for escaped zoo animals.

Then the lane turned a corner and simply stopped at a small cove I have never found on any map since.

It was ridiculous. Twenty metres of pebbles, water so clear I could see fish darting between rocks, and not a single person. Just a rusted fishing boat pulled up on stones, a plastic chair with no apparent owner, and a fig tree dropping ripe fruit onto the ground. I sat on that pebble beach for an hour, eating figs that tasted like honey and shame, thinking about how often my stubborn wrongness leads somewhere better than my careful planning ever does.

I tried to find it again twice during that fortnight. Failed both times. The lanes shifted, or my memory did, or perhaps the place only exists for the properly lost.

We did find other accidents. A konoba near Makarska where we stopped for directions and stayed for three hours, eating prsut and cheese from a grandmother who spoke no English and communicated entirely through gestures and occasional shouting. A vineyard above Baska Voda where we pulled in thinking it was a viewpoint, ended up drinking plavac mali with the owner, and left with a bottle we still haven't opened because the memory feels too specific to that afternoon. A swimming spot beneath the coastal road where locals parked their cars and jumped from rocks, where I swallowed my dignity and my pride and simply asked if we could join.

The apartment became our anchor, our reliable base with its pine-scented balcony and its fridge that hummed reassuringly through the nights. But I stopped trying to plan properly after that first morning. I took wrong turns deliberately. I followed cats, and old men, and the smell of woodsmoke from hidden gardens.

On our final evening, we found ourselves on a path above Baska Voda, watching the sun drop behind the Biokovo mountains, and I realised that every favourite moment of the holiday had come from my spectacular inability to follow instructions. The stuck suitcase, the scenic misadventure, the unfindable cove. I am not a wise man, but I am, occasionally, a lucky one.

My partner, who has the patience of a saint and the navigation skills I lack, just squeezed my hand and said nothing. She knew. We both knew. Sometimes you have to get properly lost to find anything worth finding.