I have never been so relieved to see a washing machine in my life. There I was, standing in the driveway of our holiday let in Omis Duce, Dalmatia, clutching a carrier bag of clothes that smelled distinctly of ferry diesel and regret. The mishap? Let's just say that when the nice man on the Split car ferry said "mind the ramp," I heard "fine, stand there," and a sudden swell did the rest. My entire suitcase, perched on the rear seat, took a salty bath. Welcome to Croatia.

The journey down from Split had already been a triumph of stubbornness over navigation. I had insisted on the "scenic route," which my phone translated as "goat track with aspirations." Somewhere above Jesenice, I took a wrong turn that felt less like a mistake and more like a portal into someone else's afternoon. The road narrowed to a single lane between dry stone walls, and I found myself in a hamlet where an old boy was sat on a plastic chair, watching a goat watch me. He didn't wave. The goat did, sort of, with its ears. I reversed with the dignity of a man who absolutely meant to arrive this way.

By the time I reached the property in Duce, a little strip of coast just west of Omis proper, I was half-mad with heat and entirely ready to believe that washing machines are sentient and benevolent. The place itself appeared through a clutch of pines and bougainvillea: a modest stone house with shutters the colour of faded terracotta, the sort that makes you feel immediately that you've overpacked and under-lived. I dumped my diesel-scented luggage on the terrace and stood there, listening to nothing but cicadas and the distant clatter of someone else's lunch preparation.

The beach at Duce was not the beach I had researched. That was the point, though I didn't know it yet. I had planned to drive to the famous Golden Horn, to tick boxes, to be purposeful. Instead, following the scent of grilled fish and poor impulse control, I wandered down a path beside the house that seemed to lead nowhere in particular. It led to a concrete slipway where three old blokes were repairing a net in companionable silence. Beyond them, round a rocky elbow I would never have found on purpose, lay a cove no broader than a couple of buses. No sun loungers. No bar. Just a grandmother in a headscarf, lowering herself into the water with the careful reverence of a woman who has been doing this since before tourism was invented.

I stayed for three hours. I swam out to a rock and sat there like a cormorant with no pressing engagements. A man arrived with a bucket of mussels, disappeared into a shack I hadn't noticed, and emerged twenty minutes later with two plates. He ate one himself and left the other on a windowsill. A cat materialised, ate half, and left. The system worked. Nobody checked a phone.

That evening, still in my damp trunks because my other clothes were tumbling through redemption, I walked the other direction without a map. The coastal path here is not advertised; it simply exists, maintained by the feet of people who have always known it was there. I passed a garden where someone had hung their entire fig harvest on a line to dry, like laundry. I passed a shrine to the Virgin Mary built into a wall, with a candle still burning though nobody was about. I passed my own capacity for being surprised, apparently, because when the path delivered me to a tiny harbour where a woman was selling wine from her garage, I simply accepted it as the new normal.

I bought a bottle. She refused my card and instead accepted the handful of kuna coins I had panic-withdrawn at the airport. "You walked?" she asked, though it sounded like an accusation. I admitted it. She nodded as if this explained my general condition.

The wine was rough and excellent. I drank it on the terrace as the washing machine hummed its final cycle below, feeling absurdly victorious. I had come to Dalmatia with plans and had already abandoned them to the goat tracks and concrete slipways, to the grandmothers and their patient water entries, to the understanding that getting lost here is not a failure of navigation but a different kind of arrival entirely.

The diesel smell never quite left that first batch of clothes. I wore them anyway, to the fig garden, to the cove, to the garage wine woman who began to recognise my shambling approach. Some souvenirs you don't pack; they pack you.