The thing about driving to Istria is that you convince yourself the hard part is over once you have survived the flight to Pula, collected the hire car, and remembered which side of the road to use. It is not over. I discovered this approximately four miles from Novigrad when my partner asked, quite casually, whether I had remembered to pack the folder with the property details and the key safe code. I had not. It was sitting on the kitchen table in Sheffield, next to the toaster, where I had left it in a moment of supreme organisational confidence.

We pulled into a petrol station near the coast and I performed the sort of frantic phone-scrolling that makes you look guilty even when you have done nothing illegal. The NOVASOL app saved us, thankfully, though not before I had to admit that my carefully printed itinerary was currently keeping our bread bin company. My daughter found this hilarious. She is eight and has no appreciation yet for the quiet horror of adult incompetence.

The villa itself sits just outside Novigrad proper, close enough to hear the sea if the wind is right but tucked into that lovely Istrian countryside of vineyards and olive groves and roads that feel slightly too narrow for two cars. We found it eventually, after one wrong turn that took us through someone's actual farmyard. A dog watched us pass with the weary expression of someone who has seen many lost tourists.

The key safe opened with a satisfying clunk and we stepped into that particular coolness of a stone house that has been shut up for a few hours. The smell was immediately promising: clean, slightly woody, with that faint Mediterranean hint of dried lavender that someone had left in a bowl on the kitchen counter. My son, who is eleven and generally unimpressed by most things, announced that the pool was "actually decent," which is his highest praise.

I will be honest: the first hour was chaos in the most ordinary, wonderful way. Suitcases exploded in the hallway. Someone needed the toilet immediately. The wifi password had to be located and tested on three devices. I opened the fridge to check its size and found myself just standing there, enjoying the cold air on my face like a dog with its head out of a car window. It had been a long journey.

The kitchen opened onto a covered terrace with a proper outdoor dining table, the kind that makes you immediately picture long lunches that stretch into late afternoon. Beyond that, the garden sloped down to the pool area, surrounded by a low wall and enough greenery to feel private without being isolated. My daughter was already in her swimming costume, despite my protestations about sunscreen and settling in first. Some battles are not worth fighting.

What struck me most, once the initial flurry subsided, was the quiet. Not complete silence, obviously. There were cicadas, distant voices from neighbouring properties, the occasional scooter on a nearby road. But the absence of city noise, of constant background machinery, felt like a physical relief. I sat on the terrace with a cup of tea made from the emergency supplies we had brought, because apparently I believed Croatian supermarkets might not stock teabags, and I watched my children argue gently about who had claimed which bedroom.

Novigrad itself would wait for tomorrow. The old town, the harbour, the inevitable hunt for the best seafood restaurant. For now, there was just this: a stone villa with a decent pool, a folder of instructions I did not have, and the particular happiness of knowing we had nowhere to be and nothing to prove. I thought about my kitchen table at home, about the folder sitting there, and I smiled. Some mistakes work out perfectly well.