I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I tried to unlock the wrong gustirna. There we were, me and my partner, standing in the lane just outside Trogir with three suitcases, a hire car full of crisps, and a key code that apparently opened someone else's stone cottage entirely. The woman who emerged from *that* gustirna was lovely about it, thankfully, and directed us fifty metres down an identical-looking track to our actual home for the week. Central Dalmatian Riviera, I thought. Already winning at hide and seek.

The proper gustirna turned out to be one of those renovated stone beauties you see on property programmes and assume are too perfect to exist. Low ceilings, thick walls that kept the heat out, and a terrace where grapevines had gone absolutely feral in the most charming way. We dumped our bags, opened the local wine we'd panic-bought at Split airport, and promptly got lost again trying to find the sea.

This became something of a theme.

The next morning we set off for what the owner had described as "a nice little cove, ten minutes." Forty minutes later, having missed a turning that looked like a goat path, we found ourselves in a hamlet that did not appear on any map I could load. An old bloke sitting outside his house pointed us down a track that grew progressively more suspicious. Brambles. Abandoned agricultural machinery. The distinct feeling we were trespassing. Then suddenly the trees opened up and there was this tiny shingle beach, maybe twenty metres across, with water so clear you could count the stones on the bottom. Two local lads were fishing from the rocks. They nodded at us like we were late for an appointment everyone knew about except us.

We went back three times and never found it by the same route twice.

Trogir itself is gorgeous in that UNESCO way, all medieval alleys and cathedral bells, but the real magic kept happening when we wandered off. One evening we took a wrong turn looking for a konoba the owner's cousin had recommended. Ended up in a residential street where someone's grandmother was selling wine from her garage. Literally. Plastic bottles on a folding table, handwritten prices, and a dog that may have been older than the Republic. We bought a litre for less than a coffee at home and drank it on some steps overlooking a boatyard, watching men in vests do incomprehensible things to outboard motors.

The best accidental discovery came from my stubborn refusal to use the main road. I was convinced there must be a coastal path connecting the little settlements east of Trogir. There sort of was, if you counted a concrete strip that kept disappearing into private gardens and reappearing behind someone's chicken coop. We scrambled down to a rocky point where a single sun-bleached chair sat facing the water, clearly placed there by a local with excellent priorities. We stayed until the light went strange and golden, neither of us saying much, which for me is practically a miracle of self-awareness. I kept thinking about how planned my holidays usually are, how I research restaurants down to the dessert menu, and how this week of wrong turns had given me everything I didn't know I wanted.

On our last day we finally found that konoba. It was closed for a family christening. We laughed, bought more garage wine, and got deliberately lost one final time.