I have never been so relieved to see a sat nav give up on me as I was somewhere between Pula and Liznjan, watching the little arrow spin in confused circles while my wife calmly reminded me that she had, in fact, suggested printing directions three hours earlier. The mishap, if you can call getting thoroughly lost in rural Istria a mishap, began when I decided to take what looked like a shortcut on a map that turned out to be a track more suited to goats than a Fiat Panda with a boot full of supermarket shopping and two children asking if we were nearly there yet.

We had flown into Pula, collected the car, and done the sensible holiday thing of stopping at a Lidl for essentials. By essentials I mean three types of local cheese, enough prsut to worry a cardiologist, and a watermelon that would later roll out of the boot and chase me down a gravel drive. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The sat nav finally surrendered somewhere near Muntic, leaving us to navigate by instinct and occasional glimpses of the sea. Istrian countryside does not do road signs in the way that, say, the M25 does. It does narrow lanes between dry stone walls, sudden olive groves, and the smell of wild rosemary drifting through open windows. We missed our turning twice, found ourselves in someone's farmyard once, and I may have reversed into a very forgiving fig tree. My wife said nothing. She has that gift.

Then suddenly there it was, the stone house we had booked, sitting at the end of a track with a view that made me forget entirely about the watermelon currently wedged against the spare tyre. Liznjan itself is not a place that shouts. It murmurs. A small village on the southern tip of Istria, all red roofs and church bells, with the Adriatic glinting in the gaps between houses. Our property had a terrace that looked out towards the sea, a barbecue that had seen better decades, and a garden where lavender and rosemary grew in cheerful competition.

The children had the back bedroom with twin beds and immediately began arguing about who got the window side. I unloaded the shopping, discovered the watermelon had developed a crack that made it look like a modern art installation, and stood on the terrace with a beer that had somehow already got warm. The fridge, I would learn, needed a firm hand with its door seal. Everything about the place suggested gentle improvisation. The shower had two temperatures, determined and philosophical. The kitchen drawers stuck in humid afternoons. The WiFi worked best if you stood near the rosemary bush and did not move suddenly.

But that first evening, as the sun went down and we ate bread and cheese at the wooden table outside, the sat nav disaster already felt like the best possible beginning. We had arrived flustered, slightly bruised, and smelling of fig leaves. The children were filthy from exploring the garden. My wife was reading a book with her feet up. Somewhere in the village, a dog barked at nothing in particular.

I keep thinking about that first night, how we sat there until the mosquitoes politely suggested we move indoors, how the house felt immediately like somewhere we could be slightly worse versions of ourselves and nobody would mind. The chaos of arrival had stripped away any pretence of organised holiday-making. We were just there, slightly lost people in a slightly wonky house, watching the dark come down over the sea.

The next morning I would try the barbecue and nearly set fire to the rosemary. But that first impression, that sense of having stumbled into something unpretentious and real, stayed with me longer than any carefully planned excursion could have done. Sometimes the wrong turn is exactly the right one.