There's a special kind of optimism that comes with loading a family of four into a hire car at Split Airport, convinced you've packed everything. Spoiler: you haven't. Our sat-nav took us down what I can only describe as a goat's idea of a shortcut, and somewhere between a vineyard and a very judgmental-looking donkey, I realised our youngest had left his entire bag of shoes on the kitchen table in Surrey. All of them. Every single pair. He was wearing one flip-flop, which he'd found wedged under his brother's seat, and a sock he'd been using as a hand puppet since Gatwick.

We found Ploce Komarna eventually, perched above the village with that particular kind of Croatian hillside swagger, all stone walls and terracotta roof tiles that make you feel instantly like you're in a film. The owner, a chap called Ivan who spoke better English than my accountant, didn't even blink at the sock puppet situation. He just handed me a cold beer from his own fridge and said, "First time in Dalmatia?" I think he knew.

The villa itself is one of those places that looks deceptively tidy in photos but reveals its proper character once you start living in it. The kitchen, for instance, has roughly forty-seven drawers, and I have now opened all of them multiple times searching for the tin opener. It's become a sort of meditation. The living area opens onto a terrace with a view that genuinely made me stop mid-sentence, which doesn't happen often, and a pool that the boys cannonballed into approximately eleven seconds after Ivan left. My wife and I stood there with our warm beers, watching them shriek about the temperature, and I had one of those moments. You know the ones. Where you think, we're doing alright, us. Despite the sock.

Komarna village itself is barely a stroll away, though "stroll" implies a flatness that doesn't exist in this part of the world. It's more of a purposeful amble downhill, followed by a tactical ascent back up that has me reconsidering every life choice that led to my current fitness level. There's a small pebble beach where local kids were doing that effortless Mediterranean swimming thing, all brown limbs and confidence, while our lot splashed about in rented snorkels trying to spot fish they'd already scared off. We ate grilled sardines at a konoba where the owner seemed mildly offended that I wanted a menu, and quite right too. You eat what he's cooking, and you thank him for it.

The evenings have been the real revelation. The villa's outdoor kitchen, complete with a proper brick barbecue, has seen some heroic failures from yours truly. I cremated some prawns on night two while insisting I had the hang of it, and the boys now refer to anything slightly blackened as "Dad-style." There's a covered terrace where we've eaten every meal, swatted at the occasional mosquito, and watched the sun drop behind the Peljesac peninsula in that particularly Dalmatian way, all oranges and pinks that feel almost aggressive in their beauty.

I keep thinking about that missing bag of shoes. Not in a stressed way anymore. The boys have been barefoot or in borrowed water shoes from a kind neighbour, and they haven't complained once. There's something about this place, this slightly chaotic, stone-floored, tin-opener-hiding place, that strips away the need for everything to be just so. We're here. We're slightly sunburned and eating too much octopus and arguing about whose turn it is to fetch more ice from the freezer. It's enough. More than enough, actually.

Tomorrow I might find that tin opener. Or I might not. Either way, there's sardines to be eaten and a pool to be splashed in, and my youngest has now adopted the sock puppet as his official holiday footwear. Some things, I've decided, are better left at home.