I have never been more grateful for a sat nav's monotone patience than I was driving to Nasice. Continental Croatia, they said. Peaceful, they said. What nobody mentioned was that Croatian country roads have a sense of humour that borders on the sadistic. I took a wrong turn somewhere after Osijek and found myself on what I can only describe as a farm track having an identity crisis, pretending to be a B-road. My hire car, a Fiat Punto with the suspension of a shopping trolley, was not impressed. Neither was I, particularly when a chicken shot across my path like a feathered missile and I nearly deposited my entire luggage into the footwell.

Three hours, two mild panic attacks, and one deeply undignified three-point turn in a field entrance later, I finally spotted the sign for Nasice. The property sat at the end of a gravel driveway, all red-tiled roof and welcoming shutters, looking like it had been waiting for someone exactly like me: frazzled, slightly lost, and in desperate need of a cold drink.

The door opened before I could knock. Marija, the owner, stood there with the expression of someone who had been watching my approach through the curtains for a solid ten minutes. She was seventy if she was a day, wearing a floral apron that had seen better decades, and she folded her arms and said, "You took the chicken road." Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered with the gravity of a doctor diagnosing something embarrassing.

I started to apologise, to explain about the sat nav, about the chicken, about my general incompetence with rural navigation. Marija held up a hand. "The chicken road is wrong road," she said. "But you are here. You want coffee?" I have never wanted coffee more in my entire life.

The coffee came in tiny cups, thick and dark as tar, accompanied by a plate of something Marija called "pita" that turned out to be not the flatbread I expected but a glorious, flaky pastry stuffed with cheese and spinach. She watched me eat with the critical attention of a Michelin inspector, nodding approvingly when I made appreciative noises. "English," she said, not unkindly. "Always hungry, always lost."

Her husband Stjepan appeared from somewhere behind the house, carrying a toolbox and wearing overalls with suspicious oil stains. He spoke no English whatsoever but communicated entirely through expressive shrugs, raised eyebrows, and occasional bursts of what I assumed were Croatian swear words. Marija translated none of it, merely rolling her eyes and telling me, "He says welcome." I rather doubted this was the full translation, particularly given Stjepan's accompanying gesture that seemed to suggest I had driven through his vegetable patch. I had not, I checked later. The tracks were from a tractor. Probably.

By evening, I had met three neighbours who had apparently received news of my arrival via some ancient rural telegraph system. First came Ivan, who appeared at the fence with a bottle of homemade sljivovica and the announcement that he was "the doctor" of the village. He was not, Marija whispered, a doctor in any recognised sense, though he did own impressive quantities of plum brandy and strong opinions about football. He insisted on testing my pronunciation of Croatian phrases, collapsing into wheezing laughter when I mangled "hvala" into something that apparently meant "goat cheese." I kept practicing. He kept laughing. The sljivovica kept flowing.

Then there was Katarina, Marija's sister, who arrived with a knitted jumper she had made "for the English" and presented it to me with ceremonial seriousness. It was approximately three sizes too large and the colour of a particularly violent sunset. I wore it immediately, and she clasped her hands to her chest with such genuine delight that I felt something complicated happen behind my ribs. It is strange, I thought, drinking terrible brandy in an oversized jumper in eastern Croatia, how quickly strangers can make you feel found.

The last visitor was a teenage boy called Luka, Ivan's grandson, who spoke actual English and had been dispatched to translate. He was mortified by this task, by his grandfather's volume, by my jumper, by existence itself. "He says you are funny," Luka translated, as Ivan gestured expansively. "He says you are like his donkey, very stubborn." Ivan nodded, pleased. I chose to take this as affectionate.

That first evening, sitting in Marija's garden as the light went soft and the mosquitoes began their evening operations, I realised something. I had arrived convinced I was having a disaster of a journey, that wrong turns and chickens and a Fiat Punto's rebellion against rural life meant I was failing at travel somehow. But these people, with their terrible translations and their homemade alcohol and their absolute insistence on feeding me until I could barely move, they did not care about my incompetence. They found it entertaining, perhaps. Endearing, even. But mostly they just found it human.

Marija refilled my coffee cup without asking. Stjepan demonstrated, through elaborate mime, how I should prune the grapevine if I intended to stay long enough for it to matter. Ivan sang something that might have been a folk song or might have been football chants, and Luka sank lower in his chair with the exquisite suffering of the young.

I went to bed that night in a room that smelled of lavender and old wood, wearing my ridiculous jumper, slightly drunk on plum brandy and something harder to name. The sat nav sat reproachfully on the dresser. I did not need it anymore. The chicken road had brought me exactly where I needed to be.