I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I tried to unlock the wrong apartment for a solid ten minutes, much to the amusement of a Croatian grandmother three balconies up who eventually shouted down the correct door number in broken English. Turns out I'd been jiggling my key at number 42 when our Makarska Baska Voda place was two floors higher, tucked behind a hibiscus bush that had grown with enthusiastic abandon across half the doorway.

The drive down from Split had been straightforward enough, if you consider white-knuckling along the coastal road while lorries the size of small villages thunder past your wing mirror to be straightforward. I'd arrived with that particular brand of British optimism that assumes everything will work out despite evidence to the contrary, and the apartment key fiasco had done nothing to diminish it.

What struck me first was the smell. Not the sea, though that came later, but the jasmine climbing the neighbouring wall and something citrusy I couldn't identify. The grandmother, having established herself as my unofficial guardian, pointed at a tree I'd walked straight past and said "mandarina" with a shrug that suggested I was hopeless but she was prepared to tolerate me anyway.

I dumped my case and did what any sensible person does in an unfamiliar place: wandered off without a map, phone deliberately left behind, determined to get properly lost. The old town of Baska Voda doesn't reveal itself to the organised. It's a maze of stone staircases that appear to lead nowhere until suddenly you're overlooking a tiny cove with fishing boats pulled up on shingle, the kind of spot that doesn't appear in guidebooks because nobody's thought to write about it.

I found a bakery by following my nose, which is my most reliable navigation tool. The woman behind the counter spoke no English and my Croatian extends to "hello", "thank you", and "beer", which is admittedly a solid foundation. We communicated through pointing and enthusiastic nodding, and I emerged with something warm and cheese-filled that I ate on a bench watching elderly men play cards with the intensity of international poker champions.

The real discovery came when I took a turning that looked like a driveway but narrowed into a proper path, climbing steeply between houses with washing strung between balconies like colourful bunting. I was genuinely lost now, breathing hard, wondering if this would end with me knocking on someone's kitchen door to ask for directions through their window.

Instead it ended with a clearing and a view that made me stop mid-step. The islands of Hvar and Brac sat in the distance, the water between them shifting through impossible blues, and below me a beach so small it couldn't have held twenty people, tucked between rocks where someone had built rough stone steps for access. Two local boys were jumping from a low cliff, their shouts carrying up to where I stood feeling like I'd stumbled into someone else's secret.

I found my way back eventually, though not without another wrong turn that deposited me in someone's courtyard where three cats regarded me with the disdain I was coming to recognise as a local characteristic. The grandmother waved from her balcony as I finally located my door, my cheese pastry long finished, my legs tired, my sense of direction thoroughly humiliated.

That evening I sat on my small terrace with a bottle of Posip, watching the light fade and listening to the sounds of dinner preparations floating up from surrounding apartments. I'd arrived that morning with a key to the wrong door and no plan beyond avoiding one. The best things I'd found, I realised, came from that cheerful incompetence: the hidden cove, the bakery conversation, the accidental viewpoint, the cats who'd judged me and found me wanting.

Some holidays you plan meticulously and execute perfectly. Others you spend trying to break into someone else's holiday let, getting lost in residential backstreets, and discovering that not knowing where you're going is occasionally the exact right approach.