I have never been so grateful to see a man in Crocs carrying a length of rope as I was on the afternoon we arrived at our villa in Slatine. The journey from Split airport had been straightforward enough, a hire car with air conditioning that wheezed like my uncle after Sunday lunch, winding along the coast road with the Adriatic winking at us through the pines. My partner was navigating, which is to say she was holding her phone at arm's length and making sceptical noises. I was driving and pretending confidence, the universal male holiday tradition.

The mishap came at the final hundred metres. The villa sat perched on Ciovo island, connected to Trogir by a bridge that felt narrower than my patience after three hours of travel. The satnav cheerfully announced our destination. I turned up a steep lane, gravel crunching, and promptly wedged the front left wheel into a drainage ditch that some thoughtful local had camouflaged with overgrown lavender. The hire car tilted at an angle that suggested imminent catastrophe. My partner stopped making sceptical noises and started making pointed ones.

We stood there in the afternoon heat, me contemplating the physics of Croatian drainage and her contemplating the physics of our relationship, when Stipe appeared. He emerged from the neighbouring property wearing those Crocs, a faded football shirt, and the serene expression of a man who has seen many British drivers meet their match on this particular lane. He spoke no English beyond "no problem" and "wait," which he said approximately fourteen times over the following hour. The rope was for his tomatoes, originally, but he repurposed it with the ingenuity of a man who has spent decades solving problems with whatever lies to hand.

Stipe's wife, Dragica, brought us coffee while her husband enlisted two teenagers from down the lane, a boy called Luka who was supposedly helping at his father's konoba and a girl called Mia who was ostensibly walking her grandmother's terrier but had clearly abandoned both duties for entertainment value. The terrier appeared independently and spent the entire rescue operation yapping at the hire car's front bumper as if personally offended by its predicament.

The five of us, plus dog, heaved and directed and misunderstood one another in three languages. Stipe's system of hand signals became increasingly elaborate, at one point resembling interpretive dance. Luka took photographs for his Instagram, which he showed me later with the caption "British parking." Mia translated between her limited English and Stipe's nonexistent variety, mostly by shrugging and guessing. Dragica provided running commentary to no one in particular, delivered in the tone of a woman who had witnessed this scene annually for decades.

When we finally emerged, scraped but functional, Stipe refused payment with the offended dignity of a man whose hospitality operates on older codes. Instead he accepted a beer, which became three, which became an invitation to return that evening for grilled fish. We did, of course, bringing wine that Dragica tactfully ignored in favour of her own rakija. The teenagers came too, Luka having finished his shift and Mia having located the terrier. We sat on plastic chairs as the sun lowered over the channel, the lights of Trogir beginning to prick the gathering darkness, and I understood something about why people return to the same places.

The villa itself was lovely, all whitewash and terracotta and a terrace where we ate breakfast watching fishing boats putter toward Split. But I remember the people more precisely than the view. Stipe's methodical approach to crisis. Dragica's practised eye for when the fish needed turning. Luka's ambition to study marine biology, which he confessed to me privately as if it were slightly embarrassing. Mia's insistence that she would absolutely not inherit her grandmother's terrier, followed by her sneaking it scraps throughout the evening.

On our final morning, we found a small bag of tomatoes hanging on the villa door. No note. Just Stipe's Crocs disappearing around the corner of the lane as I opened up, the man incapable of accepting direct thanks. I stood there in my pyjamas, holding vegetables grown by a man whose name I had learned because I cannot drive properly on gravel, and felt the particular weight of holiday moments that transform into something you carry longer than photographs.