I have never been so grateful to see a man in a faded Real Madrid shirt holding a goat by its collar as I was on the afternoon we arrived in Trnbusi. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The journey from Split airport had started well enough. My partner had insisted on hiring a car, which in hindsight was sensible, though neither of us had fully accounted for the narrowness of Dalmatian coastal roads nor my tendency to panic when confronted with a lorry coming the other way on a bend. We crawled through Omis, which clings to the canyon where the Cetina river meets the sea, and began climbing into the hills. The sat nav grew increasingly hysterical. "Turn around where possible," it kept suggesting, as if we were deliberately ignoring its advice out of spite rather than following a road that simply kept going up.

Then the road turned to gravel. Then the gravel turned to something I can only describe as "aggressive suggestions of a path." We passed an elderly woman carrying a basket of figs who watched us with the expression of someone who had seen many tourists make this mistake before. I waved cheerfully. She did not wave back.

The goat incident happened when we took what I am certain was a wrong turn and found ourselves in someone's courtyard. The man with the Real Madrid shirt emerged from a shed, accompanied by his goat, and explained in a mixture of Croatian and expressive hand gestures that we needed to go back past the fig lady, take the left fork, and look for a blue gate that was "not the first blue gate, the second blue gate, but blue like the sea, not blue like the sky." I nodded as if this clarified everything. His goat stared at me with undisguised contempt.

We found it eventually, the second blue gate, sea-coloured, and pulled into the drive of the stone house we had booked. A woman in her sixties was waiting on the terrace, smoking and reading what appeared to be a German gardening magazine. This was Marija, the owner, whose son apparently handled the online listings while she handled the actual hospitality. She looked us up and down, taking in my partner's linen trousers and my obvious sunburn from the airport queue, and pronounced, "You took the wrong turn. Everyone takes the wrong turn. I told my son, put a bigger sign. He says the tourists like the adventure." She exhaled smoke and smiled, revealing a gap between her front teeth that made her look slightly mischievous. "I think the tourists like to suffer."

The house itself was a traditional Dalmatian stone building, thick walls, wooden shutters, the sort of place that stays cool even in August. Marija showed us around with the efficiency of someone who had done this hundreds of times but still took a certain pride in it. She pointed out the outdoor kitchen, the covered terrace, the view down towards Omis and the sea beyond. "My grandmother built this," she said, though whether she meant the house or specifically the stone barbecue I was not entirely clear. "Very good for fish. You like fish? I bring you fish tomorrow. My cousin catches. You don't want supermarket fish, supermarket fish is sad fish."

She then produced two glasses of loza, the local grape brandy, and sat with us on the terrace despite what I suspected was a considerable amount of other business she could have been attending to. She wanted to know where we were from, whether we had children, why not, was there a medical issue, no need to be embarrassed, her sister had the same problem. My partner fielded most of this with remarkable good humour while I concentrated on not choking on the loza, which tasted like something that could strip paint.

A younger man appeared at one point, introduced as Marija's nephew Dino, who drove a delivery van for a living and had come to fix a problem with the outdoor shower. He spoke excellent English, picked up, he explained, from watching subtitled films as a teenager. "Not the useful films," he said, grinning. "Mostly American action, Die Hard, this kind of thing. So I can say 'yippee-ki-yay' very well, but I cannot discuss philosophy." He and Marija bickered good-naturedly about whether the shower needed a new washer or whether I had simply not turned the tap hard enough. I had not turned the tap hard enough. This became a recurring theme.

By the time the light began to fade, painting the canyon in layers of orange and violet, Marija had established that we would be buying our vegetables from a specific stall in Omis market, avoiding a particular restaurant whose owner had wronged her cousin in 1987, and attending a festival in a nearby village the following week that we had not previously known existed. "You will come," she said, not as a question. "I will see you there. I am making soparnik." She gathered her magazine, stubbed out her cigarette with precision, and disappeared down the drive in a small Fiat that had clearly seen better decades.

We sat on the terrace as the first stars appeared, slightly dazed from loza and information. Somewhere below, the Cetina river wound towards the sea. Somewhere above, a goat was probably still judging me. I thought about the fig lady, the man in the Real Madrid shirt, Marija's absolute certainty that she would see us at a village festival we had not agreed to attend. This was not the Croatia of glossy brochures and carefully curated experiences. This was something messier, funnier, more particular. I was already slightly terrified of what tomorrow might bring, and completely certain that I would not have traded this arrival for anything smoother.