I'd driven from Split airport with the confidence of a man who'd watched one YouTube video about Croatian roundabouts. The hire car was too big, the sat nav had given up three miles back, and my wife was quietly googling "divorce laws EU" in the passenger seat. Our two children had reached that peculiar holiday hysteria where everything is either hilarious or grounds for a tantrum. No middle ground.

The turn-off for Plano village appeared without warning, as these things always do. I swung left with theatrical confidence, misjudged the width entirely, and deposited the front nearside wheel into a drainage ditch with a gentle, expensive-sounding crunch. A local chap walking his dog didn't even break stride. I suspect he'd seen this performance many times before.

Twenty minutes, one helpful neighbour, and a minor dent to my dignity later, we found the property. And here's the thing about arriving somewhere after a small disaster: the relief is almost narcotic. The stone house sat behind a modest garden with a terrace that looked out towards the Trogir channel, close enough to smell the sea but not so close you'd drown in your sleep. Perfect, in other words. My wife unclenched. The children stopped threatening mutiny.

The first job was always going to be the pool check. Not by me, you understand, but by our youngest, who treats water quality assessment with the seriousness of a municipal health inspector. She pronounced it acceptable within seconds, clothes still on, producing the kind of shriek that makes you grateful for rural locations. The rest of us unpacked with that particular holiday energy where you can't find the kettle but you've already located the wine glasses.

I must mention the outdoor kitchen because it became, within hours, the centre of our entire operation. There's something about cooking outside that makes a man believe he's more capable than he is. I stood there with a beer, poking at sardines from the local market, feeling genuinely pastoral while my wife dealt with the actual organisation indoors. The children established a complicated routine of pool-to-terrace-to-garden-to-pool that seemed to require no parental input whatsoever. I watched them and felt briefly, falsely, like I'd mastered parenting.

The village itself revealed itself slowly, which is the best way. A short wander brought us to the local shop where I attempted Croatian with the enthusiasm of the truly incompetent. The woman behind the counter responded in perfect English, naturally, but with enough kindness that I didn't feel entirely humiliated. We bought bread, cheese, and some tomatoes that actually tasted of something, which always feels like a minor miracle when you live in Britain.

Evening brought that particular Dalmatian light, the kind that makes amateur photographers of us all. I took seventeen identical photos of the terrace while my wife read her book and pretended not to notice. The children, exhausted finally, fell asleep in the kind of deep, trusting way that makes you forgive them everything. I sat with a glass of local white and listened to the cicadas, which are essentially nature's white noise machine for the emotionally fragile.

That first night, I kept waiting for the usual holiday anxiety to arrive. The sense that you've made a terrible mistake, that the weather will turn, that someone will get ill. It didn't come. Perhaps the drainage ditch had used up my quota of worry for the week. Perhaps it was simply the right place at the right time, which is mostly luck and partly the courage to book somewhere without a hotel buffet.

We woke to sunshine and the sound of our youngest already in the pool at an hour that should be illegal. My wife and I exchanged that particular look of the moderately sleep-deprived, the one that says "we're on holiday" and "help me" in equal measure. I made coffee in the outdoor kitchen, burned the first round of toast, and watched a lizard watch me from the wall. It seemed unimpressed. Fair enough, really.

By the second morning, we'd established our rhythm. Slow breakfasts, lazy arguments about who was fetching more bread, afternoons that blurred into evenings without anything resembling an achievement. The children made friends with a neighbourhood cat that had no intention of committing to the relationship. I read approximately six pages of a novel before falling asleep in a position that would trouble my chiropractor.

This is what I keep returning to when people ask about Croatia, as they inevitably do when you've been somewhere they haven't. It wasn't the dramatic moments, of which we had mercifully few. It was the ordinary pleasure of a stone house in a village where nothing much happens, where the sea glitters in the distance and the days unfold without urgency. The mishap with the car became, within hours, a story we told each other with increasing embellishment. By day three, I'd practically driven into the Adriatic.

We never did make it to Trogir old town that first week, despite it being barely fifteen minutes away. Something always intervened. The pool. The terrace. The sudden necessity of doing absolutely nothing. I felt briefly guilty about this, the way you do when you're not maximising a location. Then I remembered that maximising is a terrible word for a holiday, and let it go.

The lizard remained unimpressed throughout.