I have never been very good with directions, which is how I ended up driving the wrong way down a one-way street in Trogir old town with a Croatian man waving his arms at me like I was trying to land a plane. This was not the serene arrival at Trogir Marina I had imagined. My partner was doing that thing where she stares straight ahead and pretends she is not in the car. I reversed with what I hoped looked like confidence, found the proper route, and eventually pulled into the marina car park with the sort of relief you normally feel after minor dental surgery.

The apartment itself was one of those modern places built right into the marina complex, all clean lines and balconies overlooking the water. I stepped out onto ours with a coffee the next morning and nearly dropped the lot. The view was ridiculous. Yachts bobbing about like they were posing for a postcard, the old town across the water looking properly medieval, mountains behind it all doing their dramatic hazy thing. I just stood there in my pants for a good five minutes, which is when I noticed the woman in the next balcony doing exactly the same thing. We nodded at each other, two half-dressed strangers acknowledging the universal language of "blimey, look at that."

The real magic started when we decided to ignore every recommendation and just wander. Trogir old town is gorgeous, obviously, but we got deliberately lost in the backstreets of Ciovo island, which sits just across the bridge. We took a left where we should have gone right, found ourselves on a narrow track between olive groves, and stumbled upon a tiny cove with nobody else there. The water was that impossible turquoise you think has been Photoshopped until you see it yourself. We swam and dried off on rocks like lizards, and I realised I had not thought about work for three hours. That never happens.

Another afternoon we set off walking along the coast path heading vaguely east, no real plan, just following the water. The path petered out, became a scramble through scrubby pines, and suddenly opened onto a pebble beach where an old boy was selling wine from his boat. He had no English, we had barely any Croatian, but through pointing and laughing we ended up with plastic cups of genuinely excellent red and some dried figs he produced from somewhere. We sat on his boat for an hour while he told stories we could not understand, gesturing at islands and making explosion noises we eventually worked out were about the war. It was one of those accidental encounters you could never plan and would never find in a guidebook.

The best discovery came from our worst navigational failure. We missed the turning for the supermarket, ended up on a road climbing into the hills behind Marina, kept going because turning around felt like admitting defeat. The tarmac became gravel, the gravel became dirt, and then we crested a ridge and found a ruined stone house with fig trees growing through it, looking down over the entire Dalmatian coast spread out below. We sat on the crumbling wall and ate the emergency biscuits we keep in the glovebox for precisely no good reason, and I felt that particular contentment that only comes from being lost and not caring.

I am not sure what I expected from a marina apartment holiday. Probably something a bit sterile, a bit boats-and-cocktails. What I got was something better: the revelation that the most memorable bits happen when your plan falls apart, when you take the wrong turning, when you end up somewhere you never meant to be with wine in a plastic cup and a view you did not know existed. I still cannot read a map properly. I am starting to think that is exactly as it should be.