I should have known the sat-nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through what looked like someone's olive grove just outside Sibenik. There I was, white-knuckling the hire car down a track barely wide enough for a scooter, convinced I'd be explaining a scratched bumper to a Croatian farmer and an insurance company in roughly equal measure. Turns out the actual road to Rogoznica Razanj was about two hundred metres to my left, perfectly tarmacked, utterly obvious. I blame the jet lag. And the fact that I'd been up since four that morning swearing I could definitely fit everything into a cabin bag. I could not, by the way. The extra bag cost nearly as much as the flight, and I'd spent the journey from Manchester with a beach umbrella wedged between my knees like some sort of budget holiday penance.

By the time I finally crawled into the village, my temper had frayed to roughly the consistency of old string. The afternoon heat was doing that shimmery thing off the tarmac, and I'd developed an irrational grudge against every cyclist enjoying the coastline without a care in the world. Then I saw the sea. Properly saw it, I mean, not through a windscreen with a sat-nav barking contradictory instructions. The water in Razanj bay was that impossible blue you convince yourself must be filtered in photographs until you witness it yourself, flat calm and studded with little white boats bobbing about like scattered confetti.

The property sat perched above it all, a modern stone-and-glass affair that managed to look both impressively contemporary and somehow utterly at home among the pines and the drystone walls. I say "sat" - what I mean is I spent a good ten minutes driving past it because the entrance was far more discreet than my ego wanted to admit. Three-point turn number one. Three-point turn number two. A local chap walking his dog stopped to watch with the patient amusement of someone who has seen this performance many times before. I gave him a cheerful wave that I hope conveyed "totally in control here" rather than "please help me, I am broken."

The key safe was exactly where the instructions said, which felt like a minor miracle given my track record thus far. The door clicked open and that particular holiday-home smell hit me immediately - somewhere between fresh linen, distant pine, and the faint promise that someone else had already done the cleaning. I dumped my bags with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who had personally rowed from Split rather than driven a perfectly comfortable hire car, and made straight for the terrace.

This was the moment, I think, when the whole daft journey finally made sense. The infinity pool seemed to spill directly into the Adriatic beyond, and for a few seconds I genuinely could not tell where one ended and the other began. A wasp investigated my beer with the persistence of a seasoned critic, and I let it. The sun was starting its lazy descent towards the horizon, painting everything in that honeyed light that makes Dalmatia look like it has been permanently Instagram-filtered by some benevolent deity.

I had not brought proper groceries, of course. The ambitious plan of cooking fresh fish on the outdoor grill immediately collided with the reality of my empty fridge and my unwillingness to move from that terrace chair. The little Konzum in Rogoznica town would have to wait until morning. For now, there was a slightly warm bottle of Karlovacko, a packet of crisps that had survived the journey in my coat pocket, and the slow realisation that I had absolutely nothing to do except watch the light change over the Kornati islands.

The dog-walker passed below on his return journey. He did not look up. I raised my beer in silent salute anyway, to him, to the wasp, to the sat-nav currently sulking in the glove box where it belonged.