I have never been so pleased to see a goat in all my life, and that is saying something for a man who grew up in the Yorkshire Dales. But there I was, halfway up a dusty track above Privlaka, clutching a water bottle and a crumpled map from the villa's welcome pack, when this shaggy brown fellow wandered out from behind an olive tree and fixed me with that particular stare goats have perfected over millennia. You know the one. It says, "You're lost, aren't you, you daft apeth?"

He was not wrong.

The journey from Zadar Airport had started so promisingly. My partner and I collected our hire car, a Fiat so compact that I had to fold myself into it like a camping chair, and set off south along the coast road with the windows down and that particular Dalmatian sunshine pouring through. We had planned this walking holiday for months. Eight days of striding purposefully along coastal paths, conquering modest peaks, returning to our villa each evening with virtuous exhaustion and perhaps a slight sun-kissed glow. The British weather had been so relentlessly grey that I had packed three pairs of walking boots and a determination to use every single one.

The mishap occurred approximately forty minutes from the airport, at a petrol station where I attempted to refuel. In my defence, the pump labels were in Croatian, and I was still driving on the wrong side of the road in my head. I managed to fill the tank with the correct fuel, celebrated this small victory with perhaps too much enthusiasm, then drove off with the fuel cap dangling and my partner's sunglasses case sitting on the car roof. We discovered the sunglasses case three kilometres later, scattered across the tarmac like a tiny plastic explosion. The fuel cap we found still attached by its tether, flapping mournfully in the coastal breeze. My partner looked at me. I looked at the road. We did not speak for several minutes.

The villa itself, when we finally arrived, was worth every moment of mild automotive humiliation. A proper Dalmatian stone house with terracotta tiles and shutters that actually shut, surrounded by those dusty gardens where rosemary grows wild and fig trees drop their fruit with casual abundance. The owner, a woman called Marija with hands that suggested decades of olive harvesting, showed us around with patient good humour. She pointed out the walking trails marked on a local map, recommended a coastal path to nearby Drazica beach, and warned us that the weather could turn quickly in September. We nodded sagely, British tourists who had checked the forecast and packed accordingly. What did we know?

The first two days were glorious. We walked the coastal path to Drazica, scrambled over limestone rocks with the Adriatic glittering below, and returned to grill fish on the villa's barbecue as the sun set over the Velebit mountains. I felt smug. Too smug, as it turned out.

Day three dawned with clouds that gathered like relatives at a funeral. By midday the rain was coming sideways, driven by a bora wind that Marija had mentioned but I had somehow dismissed as local colour. Our planned hike to the nearby Kozjak hills became instead a damp shuffle to the local konoba, where we ate prsut and drank wine and watched the storm turn the sea the colour of old slate. The British weather had followed us, I joked, though my partner noted that I was not laughing quite as heartily as I pretended.

Day four brought more of the same, and with it my first proper moment of reflection. I had become so fixated on walking as achievement, on ticking off trails and accumulating virtuous kilometres, that I had forgotten how to simply be in a place. There we were, trapped by weather in a stone villa in Dalmatia, and I was sulking like a child denied a promised treat. My partner, wiser than I, had already adapted. She was reading on the covered terrace, occasionally commenting on the dramatic sky, perfectly content. I joined her eventually, bringing more wine, and we watched lightning flicker over the islands while the rain hammered the tiles above us.

When the weather cleared on day five, we walked again, but differently. A shorter loop through Privlaka's outskirts, past smallholdings where tomatoes ripened in polytunnels and elderly men repaired fishing nets in their gardens. We stopped to talk, or rather to attempt talk through my phrasebook Croatian and their patient smiles. The goat, when I encountered him on day six, represented something I needed. A reminder that I was not conquering this landscape, merely passing through it, and that getting slightly lost was not failure but rather the point of being somewhere unfamiliar.

The final days brought more walking, more sunshine, more of that particular limestone light that makes Dalmatian coastlines so unforgettable. But I kept returning to that storm-bound terrace, to the lesson I had needed to relearn. We British bring our weather obsession everywhere, I realised, but also our weather resilience. The walking boots stayed in the villa once more, abandoned for an afternoon's swimming in unexpectedly warm shallows. I did not mind. The goat, I am certain, would have approved.