I have never been brilliant at reading maps, which is a polite way of saying I once tried to navigate Split airport using a screenshot of a completely different car park. So when my partner handed me the directions to our holiday let in Makarska, I felt the familiar flutter of impending disaster.

The drive from Split should have been straightforward enough. An hour and a bit down the coastal road, hugging the Adriatic, catching glimpses of islands that looked like they had been dropped there by a generous giant. I was determined to be useful. I had a printed route. I had optimism. What I did not have, apparently, was the ability to distinguish left from right when under mild pressure.

We missed the turning for Makarska entirely and found ourselves climbing into the Biokovo mountains, the road getting narrower and my partner's grip on the steering wheel getting tighter. The sat nav, in what I can only describe as a sulk, kept insisting we make a U-turn on a single-track road with a sheer drop on one side. A local in a battered Renault overtook us with the confidence of someone who had done this a thousand times, and I waved cheerfully as if we were exactly where we meant to be.

Forty minutes later, we limped into Makarska from entirely the wrong direction, slightly shaken, thoroughly lost, and in desperate need of a cold drink.

And then we opened the gate.

The garden swallowed us whole. Not in an alarming way. In the way that makes you exhale for what feels like the first time in months. There was a terrace with terracotta pots spilling over with geraniums, a stone barbecue that looked like it had hosted decades of fish suppers, and beyond it all, the sort of view that makes you wonder why anyone bothers with anywhere else. The sea was doing that particular Dalmatian thing where it shifts between turquoise and deep blue depending on how the light catches it, and the islands sat there obligingly, as if posing for a postcard.

Our holiday home was simple in the best possible way. White walls, wooden shutters, furniture that had been chosen for comfort rather than statement. But it was the outside that got me. A covered terrace with a long wooden table where we immediately dumped our bags and sat down with bottles of Karlovacko, too tired to unpack, too happy to move.

I had brought three books with me, an act of ambition that now makes me laugh. I read perhaps forty pages of one over the course of ten days. The garden had other plans for my attention. Mornings became a ritual of carrying coffee outside in the cool air, watching the light change on the water, occasionally spotting a ferry making its slow crossing. There was a hammock strung between two pines that I claimed with the territorial instinct of a cat finding a sunny windowsill.

My partner, who cannot sit still at the best of times, surprised us both by developing a passion for doing absolutely nothing. We bought bread and cheese from the market in Makarska's old town, tomatoes that actually tasted of something, figs from a roadside stall. We ate lunch on that terrace with our feet up, arguing half-heartedly about whether to swim before or after our nap. The nap always won.

Some afternoons I would drag myself the thirty metres to the pool and float on my back, staring up at the pines, listening to the cicadas. Other times I would simply move from the hammock to a sun lounger, like a sloth relocating to a neighbouring branch. The books stayed on the table, gathering a light dusting of pine needles, occasionally used to swat at an optimistic wasp.

There was a lemon tree in the garden, heavy with fruit that nobody seemed in a hurry to pick. I found something deeply comforting in that. The unharvested lemons, the geramiums doing their own thing in their pots, the way the whole place seemed to operate on a rhythm entirely separate from any schedule I had ever known.

On our third day, I realised I had not checked my phone in twenty-four hours. Not as a conscious digital detox, not as any kind of statement. Simply because there had been no reason to. The world beyond the garden gate had ceased to feel relevant.

We did walk into Makarska itself a few times, strolling along the harbour in the early evening, watching the fishing boats come in, eating grilled squid at a konoba where the owner seemed faintly amused by our attempts at Croatian. But always, always, we were drawn back to that terrace, to the pool, to the particular quality of light as the sun dropped behind the mountains and the garden filled with the scent of jasmine.

I had arrived thinking I needed a holiday packed with activity, with sights ticked off and experiences accumulated. Instead I found something I had not known I was missing. The profound, almost radical pleasure of slowing down until you can feel your own heartbeat again.

On our last morning, I sat with my cold coffee and watched a gecko make its patient way across the terrace wall. I thought about the wrong turn that had brought us here, the mountain road, the panic, the Renault. Sometimes getting lost is the only way to find what you actually need.

I left my unread books on the shelf for the next guest, a small offering to the gods of laziness. We drove back to Split without a single wrong turn, which felt almost like a betrayal.