I have never been so relieved to see a sat nav give up on me. There we were, halfway between Zadar and Split, my phone cheerfully announcing we had arrived at a patch of olive trees while the actual villa sat somewhere below us, clinging to the hillside like a stubborn goat. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The "you said this would be romantic" look. In my defence, I had promised a week of coastal walks and sunshine, not twenty minutes of reversing down a single-track road while a local in a battered Peugeot waited with the patience of a saint.

The villa itself, when we finally found it, was worth every bead of panic sweat. Perched between Vodice and Tribunj, it had that particular Dalmatian trick of looking modest from the driveway and then revealing itself as something rather special once you stepped through. Terracotta tiles, whitewashed walls, and a terrace that dropped away towards the Adriatic with the kind of view that makes you forget your own name for a moment. I stood there with my walking boots already laced, mentally mapping out the coastal paths I had researched back in drizzly Manchester. The forecast said twenty-eight degrees and not a cloud. I practically skipped down to the village.

The first morning, I set off towards Tribunj proper, following what I believed was a marked trail. Dalmatian paths have a charming habit of being marked in ways that made sense to someone in 1973 and nobody since. I found myself scrambling over limestone rocks, the sea crashing somewhere to my left, convinced I was on some epic coastal expedition. In reality, I had walked perhaps two miles in an hour and was now staring at a private garden with an extremely unimpressed dalmatian dog. Not the regional mascot experience I had hoped for.

By day three, I had developed a system. Early starts, plenty of water, and a willingness to treat every wrong turn as a discovery rather than a failure. We walked the path from Tribunj to the little beaches near Zecevo, the pine scent thick enough to bottle, the water below shifting through colours that no photograph ever captures properly. My partner, who had brought a sun hat with approximately the circumference of a small satellite dish, began to relax into the rhythm of it. Walk, swim, eat, repeat. The British in us kept waiting for the catch.

The catch arrived on Thursday, dressed as a thunderstorm. I had checked three weather apps that morning, all promising continued perfection. By midday, the sky had turned the colour of a bruised plum and the wind was throwing pine needles around like confetti. We were halfway along the coastal path towards Vodice when the first fat drops landed, and within minutes we were in something approaching a monsoon. Mediterranean rain, I discovered, does not mess about. It arrives with theatrical commitment.

We sheltered under an inadequate pine tree, my supposedly waterproof jacket proving itself to be merely water-resistant in the most optimistic sense of the term. My partner's satellite dish hat actually came into its own, funnelling water down her neck with impressive efficiency. We laughed, initially. Then we squelched. Then we had one of those conversations that only happen when you are both slightly miserable and slightly ridiculous, about whether we actually enjoyed walking or just enjoyed the idea of ourselves as people who walked.

The storm passed, as storms do, leaving the air scrubbed clean and the limestone gleaming. We abandoned our original route and simply wandered back through Tribunj's old town, shoes squelching dramatically on the polished stone, stopping for coffee that tasted better than any coffee had a right to. A local, observing our bedraggled state, produced towels from somewhere without being asked. We must have looked genuinely tragic.

The rest of the week, we walked differently. Less ambition, more attention. Early mornings before the heat built, evening strolls when the light turned everything golden and the crickets started their endless commentary. We found a tiny cove near the villa that required scrambling down rocks and rewarded us with complete solitude. We walked to the market in Vodice for peaches that dripped juice down our wrists, and carried them back past fishing boats that smelled of salt and diesel in the most comforting combination.

On our final morning, I stood on that terrace again, boots clean for the first time in days, watching the sun come up over the islands. The weather had been perfect, then dramatic, then perfect again, and I had stopped checking the forecast entirely. Somewhere below, a path waited that I had not yet walked, and probably would get wrong if I tried. That seemed rather the point.