I have always believed that a proper holiday should begin with mild chaos, and our drive to Brestovac Novo Zvecevo delivered this in spades. Somewhere past Zagreb, convinced I had mastered Croatian motorway signage, I took what I shall generously call a "scenic detour" through what felt like seventeen identical villages of red-tiled roofs and suspicious stares. My partner sat beside me, studiously examining her phone and making pointed comments about how interesting it was that the satnav still thought we were forty minutes away. Forty minutes became ninety. I developed a twitch every time I saw a sign for Slavonski Brod, a place we were decidedly not meant to be visiting.

By the time we found the turning for Novo Zvecevo, I had the sweaty desperation of a man who has argued with his own reflection in the rearview mirror. Then the tarmac gave way to gravel, the gravel to something I can only describe as "agricultural," and suddenly there it was: a proper Croatian country house, all honey-coloured stone and wooden shutters, with a covered terrace that looked like it had been waiting specifically for two frazzled Brits to collapse upon it.

The owner, a cheerful woman named Marija, appeared with keys and what I initially thought was lemonade but turned out to be something considerably stronger. "You walked from England?" she asked, gesturing at our mud-splattered estate car. I chose to interpret this as charming local humour rather than commentary on my driving.

We had arrived with grand hiking ambitions. The Papuk Nature Park lay practically at the doorstep, and I had packed boots with the earnestness of a man who owns ordnance survey maps for counties he has never visited. That first morning, I woke to grey skies and a peculiar optimism. "Bit of drizzle never hurt anyone," I announced, channelling my grandfather who had apparently said this during actual wars.

The drizzle became rain. The rain became something meteorologically aggressive. We squelched up a forest path for perhaps forty minutes before my supposedly waterproof jacket surrendered completely, sending a rivulet of cold water down my spine that made me yelp like a surprised terrier. My partner, sensibly clad and therefore smug, suggested we might consider the Croatian approach to such weather, which apparently involved coffee, shelter, and patience.

We retreated to a mountain hut we had passed, where an elderly man tended a wood stove and served thick black coffee with no apparent concern for the weather's betrayal. Through charades and my six words of Croatian, we established that April in Continental Croatia was, in his estimation, "sometimes like this, sometimes worse, sometimes better." I found this profound in my damp state.

The following days developed a rhythm I came to love. Morning would bring tentative sunshine, and we would stride out with the converted fervour of pilgrims, following marked trails through beech forests that smelled of earth and new growth. The paths around Brestovac offered gentle ascents and sudden clearings where the view rolled away across Slavonia's patchwork fields, all ploughed earth and early green.

Inevitably, the weather would turn. We learned to read the clouds gathering above Papuk's highest ridges, to recognise that particular wind that preceded proper rain. The first time we outran a squall back to the house, we arrived breathless and triumphant, as if we had defeated something personally. The second time, we simply got wet, walking the final kilometre in resigned silence that gradually became giggling at our own stubbornness.

By the week's end, my boots had developed a personality, my jacket had admitted partial defeat, and I had walked further in variable weather than I managed in entire summers at home. There is something peculiarly British, I reflected, in travelling abroad specifically to experience weather you could have had in the Lake District, yet finding it somehow more meaningful for the foreignness of its setting.

On our final morning, the sun emerged with theatrical timing. We sat on that terrace with coffee, watching mist lift from the valley below, and I felt the particular satisfaction of earned comfort. The walking had been glorious, the weather had been characteristically unreliable, and I had finally learned to check the forecast with appropriate scepticism. Some lessons, apparently, require Croatian rain to properly absorb.