I have never been so relieved to see a goat in my life. There I was, trundling down a dirt track somewhere north of Zadar, convinced I had driven our hire car into someone's olive grove by mistake, when this splendid bearded fellow appeared from behind a dry stone wall and fixed me with a look that said, "You're not from round here, are you?" I wound down the window to ask directions, realised I was addressing livestock, and promptly reversed into a fig tree. Welcome to Vinjerac.

The journey from Zadar Airport had started so promisingly. Smooth tarmac, Croatian radio playing something inexplicably cheerful, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who had briefly glanced at a map three hours earlier. We had chosen a place called Zadar Vinjerac, a traditional stone house near the water, partly for the swimming and partly because the photographs showed a terrace where one could drink wine while watching the sun dissolve into the Adriatic. What the photographs did not show was the final approach, which felt less like arriving at holiday accommodation and more like infiltrating a medieval village by stealth.

By the time I extricated the car from the fig tree, a small audience had gathered. An elderly woman in a floral apron emerged from a doorway, watched me for a moment, then disappeared inside and returned with two glasses of what I later learned was her husband's rakija. She did not speak English. I do not speak Croatian. We communicated through a magnificent system of gestures, raised eyebrows, and her occasional pointed looks at the fig tree, which I took to mean either "pay for the damage" or "you're an idiot." Possibly both. Her name was Marija. She had lived in Vinjerac since 1958 and had opinions about everything, expressed eloquently despite our language barrier. When I finally found our house, three doors down, she accompanied me, still carrying the rakija, and introduced me to her neighbour Stipe.

Stipe was repairing a fishing net on his doorstep, a cigarette dangling from his lip, looking like central casting's idea of a Dalmatian fisherman. He was seventy-three, he informed me in surprisingly good German, which I speak barely enough to order sausages. We stumbled through a conversation about the weather, the fish, and whether English people truly ate beans for breakfast. He found this hilarious. I found his net-mending technique hypnotic. Marija interjected periodically with what I assume were corrections to his account, because he would shrug and say "da, da" and continue slightly differently.

The owner of our property, a younger man named Tomislav, arrived eventually with keys and apologies for not meeting us sooner. He had been helping his uncle move a boat. Everyone here seemed to be helping someone with something. Tomislav explained that the house had been his grandmother's, then his mother's, and now he rented it to people like us, though he confessed he sometimes wondered why anyone would pay to stay somewhere with no proper supermarket and internet that worked only when the wind blew favourably. I told him about the fig tree. He laughed for approximately five minutes, then said not to worry, Marija's husband had backed into the same tree in 1987.

That evening, sitting on the terrace with wine that Tomislav had left as a welcome gift, we watched the sun perform its disappearing act. Marija waved from her doorway. Stipe gave a thumbs-up from his net. The goat, I noted, had moved on to someone else's olive grove. I thought about how I had arrived stressed and disoriented, how I had worried about scratched paintwork and language barriers and whether I had made a terrible mistake choosing somewhere so apparently remote. Instead I found myself in a place where strangers fed you spirits and forgave your botanical collisions, where everyone knew everyone and seemed genuinely pleased to include you temporarily in that knowledge.

The internet remained patchy throughout our stay. I did not miss it once.