I'd left Split airport with the swagger of someone who'd definitely remembered everything, which was my first mistake. The hire car was roasting, my phone was already down to forty percent, and I'd packed enough factor fifty to insulate a loft. The plan was simple: follow the coastal road to Kastel Sucurac, find the property, open wine, collapse. What actually happened was that I took the wrong exit somewhere between Kastel Stari and Kastel Novi, ended up in a car park that Google Maps optimistically called a "road," and spent twenty minutes performing a seventeen-point turn while a local fisherman watched with the patient amusement of a man who'd seen this exact performance at least twice that week.

The property itself, when I finally found it, was tucked down a narrow lane where the buildings seem to lean together for shade like elderly relatives at a wedding. I dumped my bags, grabbed my sandals, and decided to "explore" before properly unpacking, which is code for getting hopelessly lost on purpose.

I wandered down what I thought was a path to the sea and instead found myself in someone's courtyard, where a grandmother was hanging laundry and motioned for me to sit. She spoke rapid Dalmatian dialect; I spoke GCSE French and panicked English. We managed an entire conversation about tomatoes through gestures alone. She gave me a fig from her tree. It was warm from the sun and absolutely perfect.

Properly turned around now, I abandoned any pretence of knowing where I was going. The old town of Trogir was technically walkable, but I was heading in what felt like the opposite direction, through residential streets where kids played football against garage doors and cats occupied every sunny windowsill. I found a tiny konoba that wasn't on any app I'd downloaded, mainly because it had no sign, just a doorway that smelled of grilled fish and garlic. The owner, Toni, explained there was no menu, just what his brother caught that morning. I ate sardines that still tasted of the sea, with potatoes roasted in olive oil that Toni's cousin presses himself. Twelve euros. I nearly cried.

The real discovery came when I tried to shortcut back and stumbled onto a concrete platform above the water, clearly someone's former boat shed, now abandoned. The view across the channel to Ciovo island was ridiculous, all blue water and red roofs, and there wasn't another tourist for miles. I sat there for an hour watching a man in a tiny boat check his nets, the whole scene so perfectly ordinary and so completely foreign to my usual frantic sightseeing.

Getting properly lost again the next morning, I found a pebble beach where locals swim before work, their towels hung on rusted railings. An older chap explained, in surprisingly good English earned from decades in Australia, that the best mussels come from the rocks just there, but you need to know the tides. He didn't offer to show me; that wasn't the point. The point was knowing something exists and choosing whether to pursue it.

By day three I'd abandoned my phone mapping entirely. I found a bakery where the burek came fresh at six, a vegetable stall run from someone's front garden, and a spot where you could watch the ferries slide past Split without the bother of actually going there. Each discovery felt stolen, unearned, the reward for incompetence rather than planning.

The thing about getting lost in Kastel Sucurac is that you're never actually far from where you need to be. The peninsula's small enough that wrong turns correct themselves, that dead ends open onto unexpected water, that the same grandmother finds you twice and isn't even surprised. I arrived thinking I'd tick off Trogir's UNESCO charms and maybe brave the Diocletian's Palace crowds. I left having barely seen either, and not particularly minding.

My final evening, I found my way back to that abandoned boat shed by accident, or perhaps because some part of me had mapped it properly while the rest wasn't paying attention. The same fisherman was checking his nets. The same impossible light was doing impossible things to the water. I'd come to Croatia with an itinerary and left with something better: the particular pride of a person who's been thoroughly lost and slightly foolish, and found that suited them just fine.