I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong apartment. There I was, standing in the stairwell of what I thought was our Makarska Ricice let, jiggling a key that clearly had no intention of cooperating, while a very patient Croatian woman peered round her door with the sort of expression that said this happened more often than you'd think. Turns out I'd wandered into the neighbouring block, seduced by identical balconies and my own unshakeable confidence in my navigational skills. My other half found it less amusing at the time, though we laughed about it later over a bottle of Plavac Mali.

The actual property, when I finally located it, turned out to be a proper gem. Nothing flashy, just a straightforward apartment with a terrace that looked out towards the Biokovo mountains, close enough to Ricice beach that you could wander down in your flip-flops without much bother. But it was what happened when we stopped following the obvious routes that made the fortnight memorable.

On our third morning, still smarting from my key mishap, I insisted we take a walk without consulting Google Maps. We headed up a path behind the apartment blocks that looked like it might lead somewhere interesting, or possibly nowhere at all. The tarmac gave way to gravel, then to something that could generously be called a track. My partner was muttering about snakes and sensible footwear while I forged ahead with the misplaced bravado of someone who'd already been embarrassed once this holiday.

The track deposited us in a small olive grove, ancient trees twisted into impossible shapes, with an old stone hut at the far end that looked like it had been forgotten decades ago. A local chap in his seventies was pruning something with the deliberate patience of a man who had nowhere else to be. He didn't speak much English, and my Croatian extends to "hvala" and "pivo", but he gestured for us to sit on a wall and produced figs from a paper bag that were so ripe they practically dissolved on your tongue. We sat there for the best part of an hour, communicating in nods and gestures, watching a lizard make its lazy way across warm stone. It was the sort of moment you can't plan, the sort that makes you wonder why you ever bother with itineraries.

Emboldened by this success, we spent the rest of the week deliberately getting ourselves lost. We found a tiny cove east of Ricice, not much more than a scramble of rocks and a sliver of shingle, where the water was absurdly clear and a local family were grilling fish on a disposable barbecue with the casual expertise of people who'd been doing it for generations. They didn't seem to mind our presence, though they didn't invite us to join either, which felt perfectly fair. We were interlopers, and there was something honest about that.

Another wrong turn led us up through pine woods to a viewpoint I'd never have found deliberately, the sort of place where you can see the whole sweep of the Makarska Riviera laid out like a postcard, but without the crowds or the ice cream vans. I sat on a rock and felt briefly smug about my poor sense of direction, which my partner found even less amusing than the key incident.

The thing about deliberately losing your way is that it forces a certain humility. You have to accept that you don't know what's coming, that you might end up somewhere disappointing or somewhere extraordinary, and that either outcome is probably fine. Standing in that olive grove, chewing a fig and understanding nothing of what the old man was saying to his dog, I felt the particular lightness that comes from being genuinely useless, from having no role to play except observer.

We never did learn the old man's name, or the name of the cove, or whether that viewpoint had any official designation. They don't appear in any guidebook I've found since. But they're what I remember when I think about that holiday, not the beaches or the restaurants or even the apartment itself, pleasant as it all was. What stays with me is the feeling of stone warming beneath me, the taste of overripe fig, and the quiet satisfaction of having gone wrong and found something better than right.