I had always fancied myself as the sort of person who checks the weather before packing for a holiday. Turns out I am not that person at all, which I discovered somewhere between Manchester Airport and Zadar, clutching a suitcase full of jumpers while the Croatian sun blazed through the aeroplane window at a frankly offensive thirty-two degrees.

The journey to Nin itself was straightforward enough, a hire car trundle down the coast that should have taken forty minutes. It took me an hour and ten because I missed the turning twice, once because I was distracted by a vineyard and once because my sat-nav decided to have what I can only describe as a small electronic breakdown. I arrived at the holiday home flushed, slightly crumpled, and already in need of the very walk I had promised myself.

The property sat on the edge of town, a modest stone house with shutters that looked like they had seen a few summers and were not particularly impressed by another one. I dumped my bag, laced up my walking boots with the enthusiasm of a woman who had been sitting down for six hours straight, and set off for Nin town centre. The plan was simple: a gentle stroll to get my bearings, perhaps a coffee by the old bridge, then a longer hike along the salt flats that afternoon.

The British weather in my head had prepared me for a bracing breeze, maybe a spot of drizzle to keep things interesting. Dalmatia had other ideas. Within ten minutes I was sweating in a way that felt personally offensive, my thick socks chafing against my boots, my jumper tied around my waist in a lump that kept sliding down and tripping me up. I passed an elderly Croatian gentleman sitting outside his house who watched me with the expression of someone observing a minor natural disaster. "Dobar dan," I wheezed. He nodded, wisely saying nothing.

Nin itself is tiny, a thumb of land connected to the mainland by two bridges, and I had walked its length before I had properly cooled down. The Church of the Holy Cross, famously the smallest cathedral in the world, sat there being charming and ancient and entirely unbothered by my perspiration. I took a photograph that I later realised featured more of my thumb than the church. A good start.

By the time I reached the salt flats, my walking plan had evolved from "bracing hike" to "desperate search for shade." The flats stretched out white and glittering, beautiful and utterly exposed. A few workers in wide-brimmed hats moved slowly between the pools, looking at me with what I now recognise as professional sympathy. I had brought no hat, no sunscreen, and a water bottle I had already half-finished. The British walking holiday, I reflected, had not equipped me for this. I am used to mud, to horizontal rain, to the grim satisfaction of completing a route while slightly miserable. Bright sunshine felt like cheating, and I was losing.

I turned back after twenty minutes, defeated by my own optimism and the Mediterranean climate. The gentleman was still outside his house when I passed again. He raised an eyebrow. I raised my empty water bottle in a toast to his superior local knowledge.

That evening, as the temperature finally dropped to something approaching reasonable, I walked again. The salt flats at sunset, with proper water and a borrowed sunhat from the property's thoughtful owners, were genuinely magical. Herons moved through the shallow pools. The sky turned colours that made my phone camera lie out of sheer inadequacy. I walked for an hour, then two, the sort of wandering that happens when you stop trying to march somewhere and simply let the place unfold around you.

The mishap of my arrival, my ridiculous outfit and my failed first expedition, became the thing I laughed about over dinner at a konoba in town, eating grilled fish that tasted of the sea and drinking wine that made me philosophical about my own foolishness. I had come prepared for British weather and found something better, something that required me to slow down, to walk at a different pace, to accept that sometimes the best hike is the one you did not plan at all.

I walked every evening after that, always as the heat faded, always with water and a hat and a sense of humour about the woman who had arrived with woollens in thirty-degree heat. Some lessons, I decided, are worth learning the hard way, preferably while slightly sunburned and very well fed.