I have never been so grateful to see a set of stone steps in my life. After a three-hour drive from Split airport that should have taken ninety minutes, a heated debate with a sat nav that insisted our villa was somewhere in the Adriatic Sea, and one spectacularly ill-advised attempt to overtake a tractor on a coastal road barely wide enough for a bicycle, we finally rolled into Rogoznica. I was driving. My partner was not speaking to me. The air conditioning had given up somewhere near Primosten. It was, in short, the perfect start.

The mishap came, as these things always do, at the precise moment we thought our troubles were over. There was the villa, perched above the water with its neat terrace and promising-looking pool. There was the key safe, exactly where the instructions said. There was the four-digit code, which I had confidently saved in my phone as 4721. I turned the dial with the theatrical flourish of a man who has finally got his act together. Nothing. I tried again. Still nothing. My partner, still not speaking to me but now radiating a particularly eloquent silence, peered over my shoulder. I checked the email again. The code was 4271. I had, in my infinite wisdom, transposed the middle digits somewhere between the airport car park and this hillside in Dalmatia. The key safe, I am convinced, judged me silently before finally releasing its contents.

The door opened onto cool tile floors and that particular hush that proper stone-built Croatian houses seem to possess. I stood in the hallway, still clutching the car keys and a faint sheen of motorway sweat, and felt the particular shame of the man who has made a complete hash of the simple things but somehow landed somewhere rather lovely anyway. The living space opened out towards the sea through glass doors, and I will admit that I may have uttered a small, involuntary noise that my partner later described as "embarrassing but understandable."

The kitchen, when I finally ventured there in search of recovery coffee, revealed itself to be alarmingly well-equipped. This is worth noting because I am the sort of person who considers a holiday kitchen a success if it contains a functional kettle and a knife that does not bend when confronted with a tomato. This one had proper pans, a decent hob, and what appeared to be a local bottle of olive oil left as a welcome gesture. I immediately felt guilty about my plans to survive entirely on supermarket ham and bread rolls.

The terrace became our recovery room for that first afternoon. We sat with lukewarm drinks because I had not yet worked out the fridge, watching boats drift across the bay and congratulating ourselves on having arrived at all. The pool glimmered with that particular turquoise that makes you forgive a great deal of travel trauma. Somewhere below, the village of Rogoznica carried on with its evening business, unconcerned by our sat nav tribulations and my key safe humiliation.

I woke early the next morning, still slightly disoriented by the journey, and made coffee in that unfamiliar kitchen while the sun came up over the islands. The mishaps of arrival already felt like someone else's story, or at least like a chapter I could now tell with something approaching affection. That is the thing about first impressions, I suppose. They are rarely graceful, almost always involve some small disaster of your own making, and yet they settle into something else entirely once you have had a moment to breathe.