I have never been so pleased to see a concrete car park in my life. After a flight to Split, a coach journey that felt longer than my entire secondary education, and a final stretch in a hire car with a sat nav that clearly fancied itself as a rally co-driver, we finally rolled into Makarska. The mishap? I had spent the last forty minutes of the drive absolutely convinced we were staying in a stone cottage up a mountain. I had packed accordingly. Hiking boots. Windproof jacket. A torch, for heaven's sake. My wife had asked me three times to double-check the listing. I had waved her off with the confidence of a man who definitely had not read past the first photograph.

Turns out our "cottage" was a modern apartment complex with a shared pool, roughly three minutes from the nearest supermarket and five from the beach. I stood in the car park with my rucksack full of expedition gear feeling like a complete wally while my two children already had their shoes off and were arguing about who got to press the lift button.

The apartment itself was spotless, I will give it that. Properly spotless. The sort of clean that makes you immediately anxious about your own standards. We found the kitchen, which had one of those hobs that beeps at you for absolutely everything, and a balcony with a view of the Biokovo mountains that did rather justify my earlier confusion. The mountains were right there, massive and craggy and dramatic, looming over the town like they were waiting for someone to bring them a cup of tea.

My daughter discovered the air conditioning unit and spent a solid ten minutes standing directly beneath it with her arms outstretched, whispering "glorious" to nobody in particular. My son found the sofa bed and treated it as a personal trampoline until I remembered I was meant to be the responsible adult. The pool downstairs was already occupied by a German family who had clearly established territorial claims at dawn. They nodded at us with the weary acceptance of people who had seen our type before.

By late afternoon we had made our first trip to the local Konzum, which is basically Croatia's answer to Tesco Express. I attempted to buy bread using my phrasebook Croatian and accidentally asked for seventeen lemons. The woman behind the counter was kind enough to pretend this was a normal request. We came away with bread, some suspiciously cheap wine, and a packet of biscuits that my wife later described as "an acquired taste" before quietly binning them.

That first evening we sat on the balcony as the sun went down behind the mountains and the town started to flicker into life below. The children were finally still, exhausted by travel and pool water and the general overstimulation of being somewhere new. My wife poured us both a glass of that cheap wine, which turned out to be perfectly drinkable, and I finally unpacked my hiking boots and put them in the wardrobe where they would remain for the entire fortnight.

I sat there feeling the warmth of the day still rising from the balcony tiles, listening to the distant sound of someone else's barbecue and the nearer sound of my son snoring slightly on the sofa bed through the open door, and I thought: this is it, isn't it? This is the whole point. Not the boots, not the plans, not the idea of what a holiday ought to look like. Just this. Just here. Just now.

Then the hob started beeping again because someone had walked past it, and my daughter announced she needed a wee, and the moment passed into the beautiful chaos of an ordinary family evening in a place that was slowly becoming ours.

I still maintain the mountains looked very cottage-adjacent in that first photograph though.