We'd been on the road from Pula Airport for the best part of an hour when I realised I'd left the sat nav in the glovebox of the hire car we'd already returned. My partner shot me that look, the one that says "we've been together twelve years and you still do this," while I waved a crumpled printout of directions like some kind of medieval standard-bearer. The olive groves of late September Istria rolled past in golden afternoon light, and I convinced myself we were definitely, probably, almost certainly going the right way.

Turns out we weren't. We ended up in a village that consisted of three houses, a cat, and an elderly man who spoke neither English nor my broken restaurant Croatian. After some creative pointing and what I can only describe as an interpretive dance involving the word "Tar," he sent us back the way we'd come with a shrug that suggested this happened weekly.

We found the turn eventually, a modest lane between vineyards where the grapes were just beginning to turn. The NOVASOL property sat at the end, a tidy stone villa with a pool that caught the last of the sun like a promise. September in Istria, we discovered, is a season of negotiation. The summer crowds have thinned to whispers, the sea holds onto its warmth like a guilty secret, and the locals have begun that slow exhale that comes after months of serving ice cream to sunburned Germans.

Our first evening, we sat on the terrace with supermarket wine and watched the light change over the fields. The cicadas were still going, though their enthusiasm had clearly waned since July. A gecko appeared on the wall, regarded us with prehistoric patience, and decided we weren't worth the effort. I understood the feeling.

The seasonal timing shaped everything. The pool, still swimmable but no longer crowded with the desperate energy of August, became our morning ritual before the day warmed properly. By ten the mist had burned off the valley, and we'd drive the few minutes to Tar's small harbour, where fishing boats unloaded catches that went straight to the restaurants we'd booked for dinner. In July we'd have queued. In late September, the waiter remembered our names by the second visit.

There was a melancholy to it, if I'm honest. The summer houses nearby had that slightly abandoned look, shutters closed against the coming autumn. The beach at Lanterna, ten minutes down the road, stretched empty in both directions. I found myself counting the days until the pool would be too cold, until the restaurants shortened their hours, until this particular version of the place ceased to exist for another year.

But that transience became the point. One morning we cycled to Porec along the coastal path, the pine needles just beginning to carpet the track, and stopped at a konoba where the owner was making his last batch of fig jam. He insisted we try it warm from the pot, and we ate it with cheese that tasted of the same dry grass we'd been cycling through. You don't get that in peak season. You get efficiency, you get the system working at maximum capacity. You don't get the fig jam guy with time to explain his grandfather's recipe.

The mishap with the sat nav set the tone, really. Getting slightly lost, being forced to slow down, accepting that the season itself was in transition and therefore so were we. On our final evening, the first proper rain came, sudden and theatrical, drumming on the terrace roof while we cooked the last of the local prsut we'd bought at a village market. The pool had definitely turned. The gecko had vanished to wherever geckos go.

We left the next morning in that particular grey-green light that means autumn has won the argument. I didn't mind. Some holidays you remember for what you did. This one, I'll remember for when we were there, and how the time of year made everything feel borrowed and therefore precious.