The thing about driving to Umag is that you convince yourself the sat nav knows what it is doing. Mine most certainly did not. Somewhere between the Slovenian border and what I thought was Crveni Vrh, I found myself down a lane barely wide enough for a goat, staring at a man in overalls who was leaning on a fence with the kind of patience that suggested this happened to him daily.

"You are lost," he said. Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered with the resigned warmth of someone who had watched many Brits come to grief on Istrian back roads.

I admitted it freely. He scratched his chin, looked at my hire car with its collection of mysterious scratches, and said something in Croatian that I later learned roughly translated to "another one." He then spent ten minutes directing me, partly through gestures, partly through what I can only describe as interpretive dance involving arm movements that suggested various turns. At one point he made a noise like a goose. I still do not know what the goose noise meant, but I nodded as if I did.

Twenty minutes later, having followed his instructions to the letter including what I now believe was an accidental goose impression at a junction, I found the Nova Sol property. The key safe code worked first time, which felt like a minor miracle, and I stepped inside to the particular silence of a holiday let that has been waiting for you. Everything was clean, modern, precisely arranged. I stood there with my single bag and my accumulated road dust and felt briefly like an impostor in someone else's very tidy life.

The balcony saved me. I went out with a beer I did not remember buying, probably left by a previous guest or perhaps the cleaning fairy, and looked at the sea. Properly looked. The Adriatic does something to you after the M6 and the Channel Tunnel and the various indignities of continental driving. It settles you. I stood there feeling smug about my view until I realised I was still wearing one flip flop and one driving shoe, a fashion choice that perfectly captured my mental state.

The next morning I ventured to the nearby shop for essentials, by which I mean coffee and something bread-adjacent. The woman behind the counter had the kind of face that suggested she had seen every possible version of tourist and found none of them surprising. I attempted "dobar dan" with the confidence of someone who had practised it twice in the car. She responded with a stream of Croatian that washed over me like warm water, then switched to fluent English with visible relief.

"You said it wrong," she informed me, not unkindly. "But you tried. The English never try." I chose to take this as a compliment to the nation rather than a personal failing. She selected my bread for me, rejecting my first choice with a small shake of the head that communicated volumes about my unsophisticated palate. Her selection was superior. Of course it was.

By day three I had accumulated what I can only describe as a cast of characters. The elderly man who walked the coastal path each morning with his small dog, which he referred to as his "boss" and whose lead he held with the formality of a state occasion. The younger chap at the beach bar who had worked summers there since he was sixteen and could read the weather in the colour of the water, a skill he demonstrated daily with the casual authority of a village sage. The German couple in the neighbouring property who communicated entirely in elaborate pantomime, having apparently decided that words were an unnecessary complication to their holiday. We developed an understanding, the Germans and I, based on shared shrugs and the occasional offering of grilled fish.

What struck me, sitting on that balcony on my final evening, was how completely these small human moments had become the holiday. The sea view was magnificent, the apartment comfortable, the local wine dangerously drinkable. But it was the people, encountered in fragments, who made the place feel inhabited rather than merely visited. The man in overalls and his goose noise. The shopkeeper's tolerant corrections. The dog walker and his tiny employer. They had let me, briefly, into their ordinary days, and in doing so had made mine feel less ordinary.

I drove away eventually, following the sat nav's instructions with deep suspicion and frequent cross-referencing with an actual paper map like someone from the previous century. At the junction where I had previously gone wrong, I paused. No goose noise required this time. I had learned, slightly, how to be there. How to be the person who tries the language, who accepts the bread selection, who stands on balconies in mismatched footwear and feels genuinely grateful for the privilege of it all.