The thing about driving to Istria is that you convince yourself the hard part is over once you've survived the Croatian motorway system, which seems to have been designed by someone who really enjoys surprises. We'd already navigated the border, survived a toll booth moment where I temporarily forgot which side the steering wheel was on, and made it through Porec without accidentally joining a coach party. Victory, surely, was ours.

Then we reached Novigrad.

Or rather, we reached what we thought was Novigrad. The sat nav, in that smug way sat navs have when they're about to betray you, announced we had arrived. We hadn't. We'd arrived at a fishing co-operative. A very nice fishing co-operative, admittedly, with some extremely well-organised nets, but not our holiday cottage. My wife looked at me. I looked at the sat nav. The children looked at their phones, pretending not to know us.

Twenty minutes of increasingly narrow Istrian lanes followed, during which we met a man on a scooter who seemed genuinely delighted to encounter a British family in a Renault Clio looking panicked. He waved us back the way we'd come with the enthusiasm of someone who'd been waiting all day for this exact entertainment. We found the proper turning eventually, tucked between an olive grove and what I now believe was someone's private vineyard, and there it was: our little stone cottage, looking like it had been waiting patiently for us to stop being idiots and actually read the directions properly.

The owner, a woman called Marija with the kind of warm efficiency that makes you feel simultaneously welcome and gently judged, handed over keys and explained the boiler in rapid Croatian-inflected English. I understood roughly every third word but nodded with what I hoped looked like competence. The children had already vanished inside, drawn by the promise of Wi-Fi and the mysterious allure of a holiday home that wasn't ours.

First impressions? The place smelled of stone and lavender, that particular dry, warm scent you only get in old Istrian houses that have spent centuries baking in the sun. The kitchen was compact in that way that makes you realise how much kitchen you don't actually need. My wife immediately opened every cupboard, a habit I find both endearing and slightly alarming, like watching someone assess the lifeboat capacity on a ferry. The children discovered the terrace, which overlooked a garden thick with rosemary and what Marija informed us were young fig trees, "maybe fruit, maybe not, depends if they like you." I liked her enormously.

I will confess that my first act, once left alone, was to attempt the outdoor grill. This was premature. I had not yet located the charcoal, the tools, or indeed any understanding of how the thing worked. I stood before it with the expression of a man who had never before encountered fire, which is roughly accurate. My wife appeared with a glass of the local Malvazija, handed it to me without comment, and suggested I perhaps unpack first. She was right, obviously. She usually is. There's something about holiday cottages that exposes the uselessness of your domestic routines, the way you operate on autopilot at home and then suddenly find yourself unable to locate a bin bag in a strange kitchen.

By evening we'd settled into something like a rhythm. The children had claimed bedrooms with the strategic precision of siblings who understand territory. We'd worked out which windows caught the breeze and which caught the afternoon sun that made the sitting room briefly uninhabitable. I'd even managed to light the grill, eventually, producing sausages that were charred in a way I chose to call "authentic." We ate on the terrace as the light went soft and golden, watching the swallows dart about the garden, and I felt that particular holiday feeling of having temporarily stepped out of your ordinary life without quite knowing how you'd managed it.

Novigrad itself could wait for morning. For now, there was this: the quiet, the warmth of stone walls cooling slowly, the distant sound of someone else's dinner preparations, and the comfortable chaos of a family finding its feet in a place that would be home for a week. The sat nav sat silent in the car, no doubt plotting its next act of betrayal. I didn't care. We were here. We had finally, properly, arrived.