I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was driving through the hills above Labin, partly because the roads are a proper Croatian adventure and partly because I had confidently told my wife I "knew exactly where we were going." Reader, I did not. We missed the turning for our holiday home not once but three times, each pass revealing a slightly more alarming drop on the passenger side and a slightly more tense atmosphere in the car. The children found this hilarious, of course. My wife did not. By the time we finally spotted the stone wall and wooden gate of our Labin Burjaki property, I had aged approximately eleven years.

The sat nav had been insisting we had arrived for a solid eight minutes. We had been arguing with a goat. I am not making this up. There it stood, the colour of old parchment, blocking a narrow track with the absolute confidence of someone who pays no rent and fears no man. My youngest named him Gerald. Gerald watched us reverse with what I can only describe as rural contempt.

But then the gate opened, and everything else fell away.

The first thing that hits you about this sort of Istrian stone house is the quiet. Not silence exactly, because the cicadas were already having their afternoon rave, but a particular kind of rural stillness that makes you realise how much noise you normally carry around in your head. The pool glimmered turquoise in the late afternoon light, surrounded by terracotta pots and that slightly wild, unbothered garden style that no British gardener has ever successfully copied. We stood there with our bags still in the car, just blinking in the warmth like lizards on a rock.

The second thing that hits you is the smell. Lavender somewhere, definitely olive, something herby that I later learned was probably sage growing wild along the path. My wife actually closed her eyes and inhaled properly, the way people do in adverts for things they cannot afford. The children had already found the pool steps and were conducting important experiments about how quickly shoes can be removed.

Inside, the house had that lovely slightly uneven quality of somewhere built when straight lines were more suggestion than rule. The kitchen opened onto a covered terrace with a proper outdoor dining table, the sort that immediately makes you fantasise about long lunches that stretch into dinners. Beamed ceilings, terracotta floors, furniture that looked like it had actually been used rather than placed by a consultant. I caught myself planning our week in ridiculous detail before we had even unpacked the tea bags.

Which brings me to the gentle self-reflection bit, because I do this every holiday. I arrive somewhere beautiful and immediately try to optimise it. Must swim before breakfast, must find the best local olive oil, must locate the hidden beach that only locals know. Within an hour I had a mental spreadsheet of activities that would have exhausted a triathlete. And then I sat on that terrace with a lukewarm Croatian beer, watching my daughter attempt to communicate with a gecko, and remembered that the whole point was precisely not to have a point.

The evening settled in with that particular Istrian softness, the light going golden and then rose and then suddenly dark. We ate bread and cheese and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, which my children found suspicious. Gerald the goat had wandered off to judge someone else. Somewhere in the valley below, a dog barked once and thought better of it.

I had planned to drive to Rabac the next morning, hunt down a particular restaurant, tick off the recommended sights. We did none of it. We made pancakes badly in a kitchen not designed for British culinary ambition. We swam until our fingers wrinkled. We argued about cards and lost a flip flop and found it in a rosemary bush. It was absolutely perfect.

Some holidays teach you things you did not know you needed to learn. Mostly they teach you that you are a bit of an idiot with a sat nav and an overactive planning instinct, and that goats are the true landowners of rural Istria. I am surprisingly at peace with both revelations.