I have never been so relieved to see a caravan park in all my life. Three hours, two wrong motorways, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted Croatian roads were "mostly suggestions," and there we were: Biograd na Moru, Dalmatia, blinking in the late afternoon sun like confused owls.

The mishap, then. We'd flown into Zadar, picked up the hire car, and promptly got ourselves wedged down what I can only describe as a goat track masquerading as a shortcut. My partner was navigating. I was driving. The sat nav was, I suspect, actively malicious. We ended up in someone's olive grove, surrounded by trees and the slow realisation that we were not, in fact, on the coastal road. An elderly chap emerged from a stone house, surveyed our predicament with the weary patience of a man who has seen many British tourists make this exact error, and gestured us back the way we'd come with a flourish that managed to be both helpful and deeply judgmental. We reversed for what felt like miles. I may have sworn. My partner may have laughed. We did not speak for twenty minutes.

But then Biograd appeared, and something shifted. The town sits on a little peninsula, all red roofs and marina glint, and our property was tucked just back from the main strip, close enough to smell the pine and the sea salt, far enough to escape the evening promenade chaos. We dumped our bags, still slightly frazzled, and did what any sensible person does when slightly lost and emotionally fragile: we went for a wander with absolutely no plan.

This is where the magic happened. We turned left where we should have turned right, following a narrow lane that petered out into a rough track above the marina. The sun was dropping, painting everything that particular Dalmatian gold, and we stumbled upon a tiny cove we'd never have found otherwise. No beach bar, no sun loungers, just a few locals fishing from the rocks and a dog that looked like it had seen things. We sat on a flat stone and watched the water turn from turquoise to ink blue, sharing a warm Fanta from a nearby machine that seemed to exist in splendid isolation. It was perfect precisely because we had not meant to find it.

The next morning, still refusing to consult the sat nav on principle, we got deliberately lost again. The old town of Biograd is compact enough that this is a pleasure rather than a panic. We found ourselves in a residential quarter of narrow lanes, laundry strung between balconies, someone practising accordion behind shuttered windows. A cat led us to a bakery where we pointed at things hopefully and emerged with burek that flakes still haunt my dreams. We ate them on a wall overlooking a vegetable garden, watched by an old woman who nodded once, approvingly, before going back to her tomatoes.

By day three, getting lost had become our entire strategy. We found a pebbled beach south of the marina where a local had set up an impromptu grill, selling grilled sardines to anyone who happened by. No menu, no prices posted, just fish and good humour. We found a path through pine woods that emerged at a viewpoint over the Pasman Channel, the islands scattered like dropped coins. We found a bar so hidden that the barman seemed genuinely surprised to see us, pouring us rakija with the ceremony of a man conducting a minor religious service.

I think, looking back, that the olive grove disaster was the best thing that could have happened. It broke something in us, some need to be efficient and correct and always knowing exactly where we were going. Biograd na Moru does not reward that approach. It rewards the wanderer, the person who follows the wrong path and finds the better view, who accepts that getting slightly misplaced is simply how you discover where you actually want to be.

On our final evening, we found ourselves back at that first accidental cove. The same dog was there. The same locals, or perhaps different ones; we couldn't be certain. We had learned nothing about navigation. We had learned everything about the particular joy of not knowing what comes next, of trusting that a Croatian coastal town will reveal itself slowly, generously, to anyone patient enough to get a bit lost in it.