I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once got lost in their own local Tesco car park. The drive up to Sv Martin na Muri Selnica had all the ingredients of a classic family holiday opener: three increasingly hungry children, a boot packed with more snacks than clothing, and my husband Mark stubbornly insisting he "knew a shortcut" through Continental Croatia that definitely did not exist.

The mishap came just outside Mursko Sredisce, where Mark's shortcut deposited us onto what I can only describe as a farm track with ambitions. Our modest hire car bottomed out spectacularly on a ridge of mud, and there we sat, wheels spinning, while a local farmer leaned on his gate and watched with the patient amusement of a man who has seen this exact scene approximately four hundred times before. Mark tried reverse, then forward, then reverse again, each attempt accompanied by increasingly creative language from the driver's seat. I wound down my window and asked the farmer for directions in my halting phrasebook Croatian. He replied with what sounded like a full weather forecast, two recipes, and possibly a poem, then pointed back the way we had come. We reversed the entire muddy half-mile in sheepish silence, children cackling from the back seat.

By the time we actually found the property, tucked into the gentle countryside near the Mura River, I was ready to kiss the gravel driveway. And I almost did, because I tripped over my own wheeled suitcase while gawping at the place. Sv Martin na Muri Selnica is one of those proper Croatian country houses that looks like it has been waiting patiently for someone to arrive and appreciate it. Wooden beams, that satisfying solidity of old stone and timber, a garden that clearly belongs to the bees and butterflies first and humans second.

The key was in the lockbox exactly where the booking said, which felt like a minor miracle given our journey. I pushed open the door and was immediately hit by that particular smell of a well-kept holiday cottage: wood polish, faint woodsmoke from a previous guest, and the green breath of the garden drifting through open windows. The children thundered past me to claim bedrooms, a negotiation that sounded like a UN peace summit conducted by shouting. Mark and I stood in the kitchen, still slightly muddy of trouser, and shared a look that said: we made it, somehow.

I will be honest with you. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from family travel, when you have been the navigator, the snack distributor, the dispute mediator, and the person who remembered to pack everyone's swimming costumes. Standing in that kitchen, listening to my lot arguing about who got the room with the better view of the garden, I felt it all catch up with me. But then I noticed the coffee maker on the counter, the proper one with the little metal pot, and a note from the owner saying the nearest shop for fresh bread was a ten-minute walk through lanes that were definitely not farm tracks. Something in my shoulders dropped. The chaos was still there, would always be there, but it had found its proper container.

By evening we had established our beachheads. The children had discovered the garden's resident lizards and were conducting a census. Mark had successfully lit the barbecue on his third attempt, a personal best. I sat on the terrace with that coffee, watching the light go soft over the fields, and felt the particular pleasure of knowing absolutely nothing urgent needed doing. Tomorrow we might walk to the river, or cycle to the local thermal baths at Terme Sveti Martin, or simply do very little at all. For now, the mishaps were already becoming stories, the mud was drying on Mark's shoes, and somewhere in the garden a child was shouting that they had definitely seen a lizard wearing a hat. I did not correct them. Some things are better left unchallenged.