I should have known the sat nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through what looked like someone's vegetable patch just outside Zagreb. Three hours into our journey to Tuheljske Toplice, we found ourselves on a road that grew narrower and narrower until it was basically a gravel track with ambitions above its station. My partner, ever the optimist, insisted it was a "scenic route." I pointed out that the only scenery was a very angry-looking goose who clearly owned this particular stretch of nowhere.

The mishap came twenty minutes later, when the track simply ended at a farm gate with a hand-painted sign we couldn't read. I got out to turn the car around, managed to wedge us into a ditch in the process, and spent a deeply humiliating twenty minutes accepting help from a farmer whose English consisted entirely of "no problem" and hearty laughter. He found the whole thing so entertaining that he fetched his wife to watch. She brought coffee. We drank it in the ditch, essentially, while discussing the weather through elaborate hand gestures. I have never felt more British in my entire life.

By the time we actually reached Tuheljske Toplice, I was ready to kiss the tarmac. The property itself sat tucked among wooded hills, the kind of place you would absolutely never find unless you were either very determined or very lost. Which, in our case, was both. The key was in a lockbox with a code that I immediately forgot, standing there in the dark, phone torch in mouth, feeling like a burglar with extremely poor planning skills.

But then morning came, and everything shifted.

We had intended to spend our first day at the famous thermal spa complex, the whole reason people come to Tuheljske Toplice. Instead, we got lost again. Properly lost this time, on foot, wandering down a path behind the property that I was certain looped back to the village. It did not loop back to the village. It went somewhere far better.

The path delivered us to a clearing where an elderly woman was selling honey from a folding table, no signage, no fanfare, just three jars and a thermos. She spoke no English whatsoever, but through pointing and smiling and the universal language of handing over small denominations of currency, we acquired what remains the finest honey I have ever tasted. Wildflower, dark and complex, the sort of thing that makes supermarket honey taste like sugary disappointment. She also gave us directions, which we absolutely failed to follow correctly.

This became the pattern. Wrong turn after wrong turn, each one some minor disaster that transformed into something unexpected. A path that dead-ended at a stream became an hour of sitting on stones, watching dragonflies, discussing whether we were technically still on holiday if we were just lost in a forest. A road that shrank to a single track led us to a vineyard where a man was pressing grapes by hand, old wooden equipment, absolutely no commercial operation about it. He let us try the must, still fermenting, sweet and alive and slightly alarming. We bought two bottles we had no way of transporting properly and carried them like newborns for the rest of the afternoon.

The thermal pools, when we finally found them on day three, were lovely. Truly. Warm water, proper facilities, all very civilised. But I kept thinking about the vineyard, the honey woman, the stream with its dragonflies. The property itself became our base for deliberate getting-lost, setting out each morning with rough intentions and no particular faith in our navigation. We found a bakery in what I can only describe as someone's extended shed, the bread still warm, the owner confused but pleased by our persistence. We found a viewpoint that appeared on no map, just a bench and a clearing and the whole valley spread below.

On our final evening, we tried to retrace our steps to the honey woman. Failed completely, naturally. Ended up somewhere else entirely, a small chapel with a door that creaked like a horror film but contained only silence and dust motes in afternoon light. We sat on the steps and ate bread from the shed-bakery with our hands, no butter, no ceremony, and I had one of those moments of gentle self-reflection that holidays sometimes allow. I am not good at being lost. I panic, I catastrophise, I treat wrong turns as personal failures. But here, in this unplanned corner of Continental Croatia, being lost had become the entire point. The sat nav had tried to ruin everything, and instead it had given us something we never would have chosen.

We never did find the thermal spa's official restaurant. Ate spectacularly well anyway. Never made it to the organised wine tasting. Drank better wine on a stranger's porch, slightly concerned about fermentation, completely content. The property at Tuheljske Toplice was comfortable, well-equipped, everything promised. But what I will remember is the feeling of rounding a bend with no idea what came next, and finding something that belonged only to us because we were too stubborn to turn back.

The farmer's wife, I should mention, sent us home with a jar of pickled vegetables. They leaked in the boot all the way to Zagreb. I have never been happier about a cleaning bill in my life.