I have never been brilliant with directions, and my arrival in Okrug Gornji proved this beyond all doubt. We had flown into Split, collected our hire car, and set off with the sort of confidence that only comes from having glanced at Google Maps exactly once. The plan was simple: follow the coast road, find Trogir, head for Ciovo Island, locate our apartment. What actually happened involved three wrong turns, a brief and unplanned tour of a supermarket car park in Trogir's outskirts, and me reversing into a bollard with a crunch that made my partner develop a sudden interest in the passenger window view.

The bollard was fine. The car was mostly fine. My dignity was in tatters.

We finally found the turning for Okrug Gornji, winding down through pine-scented lanes that grew narrower and more alarming with every metre. Croatian drivers, I have decided, possess a philosophical calm about oncoming traffic that I will never achieve. I clutched the steering wheel like a man gripping a cliff edge, while my partner helpfully noted every scratch on the parked cars we squeezed past.

The apartment complex appeared suddenly, tucked between olive groves and a glimpse of blue sea that made me forget, briefly, that I had just committed minor vehicular assault on an inanimate object. We parked, gathered our bags, and stood in the sunshine feeling rather pleased with ourselves. This lasted approximately forty seconds.

I had the booking confirmation on my phone. I also had, it turned out, zero phone battery. My partner's phone had battery but no signal. We stood in the courtyard like confused tourists, which of course we were, squinting at identical apartment doors and wondering which one contained our week of promised relaxation. A local woman walked past with her dog, observed our predicament, and said something cheerful in Croatian that we absolutely did not understand. We smiled and nodded in that desperate way people do, and she carried on, presumably filing us under "British people, lost, typical."

Eventually we found the right door through a combination of trial, error, and me trying a key that turned out to belong to our suitcase lock. The apartment itself opened onto a balcony view that stopped me mid-apology. There was the Adriatic, proper blue, not the hesitant grey-blue of British seas but a saturated, almost aggressive turquoise. Pine trees framed the shot like nature had hired a cinematographer. I stood there with my suitcase still in the hallway, my bollard shame fading fast.

The first evening we walked down to the nearest pebble beach, because that is what you do in Dalmatia. You find the sea and you go to it. The beach was small, local, occupied by families who clearly knew exactly which rock to claim and which shade of umbrella worked best. We picked our way awkwardly across stones that demanded proper footwear, which of course I had not brought, and waded in with the tentative steps of people who had last swum in Brighton in September.

The water was absurdly clear. I could see my feet, my knees, small fish conducting important fish business around my ankles. My partner, who had spent the car journey in dignified silence after the bollard incident, actually laughed. We floated there like a pair of happy fools, watching the sun drop behind the Trogir skyline across the water, turning everything gold and rose and impossibly picturesque.

That first night we ate at a konoba five minutes' walk away, sitting under vines and eating grilled fish that tasted of actual sea, drinking local wine that cost less than a London pint. The waiter spoke enough English to understand my attempt at "hvala" and kindly pretended it was passable. We walked back slightly sun-drunk, slightly wine-happy, along paths scented with pine and lavender and something else I could not identify but wanted to bottle.

I lay awake that first night, balcony door open to the sound of distant waves and closer cicadas, thinking about how arrival chaos seems to be my speciality. The wrong turns, the bollard, the locked-out confusion. Yet here I was, in a place that felt immediately, surprisingly like somewhere I could properly exhale. The apartment was simple, clean, exactly the sort of unpretentious base that lets the location do the talking. And oh, does this location talk.

My partner was already asleep, breathing that deep rhythm of genuine tiredness. I got up quietly, stepped onto the balcony, and watched a fishing boat putter across the dark water with its small light bobbing. Somewhere out there was Trogir's old town, ancient and waiting. Tomorrow we would explore properly. Tonight I just stood there, barefoot on warm tiles, feeling very small against a very big sea, and rather liking the feeling.

The bollard, I decided, had been worth it.