I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when the sat-nav decided that "Vodnjan" was pronounced "Vod-jee-an" and sent me down a track that was basically two olive trees pretending to be a road. My partner, who had been in charge of directions after a very specific "you always choose the music, I choose the route" negotiation at Gatwick, sat in silence for a good forty seconds before admitting that the tarmac had definitely run out some time ago.

We were staying at a place called Golubovo, just outside Vodnjan in Istria, and our first impression was less "Mediterranean idyll" and more "have we accidentally joined an agricultural expedition." The hire car, a Fiat Panda that had clearly never seen a hill it liked, was making noises I have never heard from a vehicle before. We passed a man on a tractor who looked at us with the kind of pity usually reserved for people trying to reverse into tight spaces in supermarket car parks.

Then, quite suddenly, the olive groves opened up and there it was. Stone walls, proper rustic charm, the sort of place that makes you immediately forget you have been travelling for six hours and argue about who gets the bedroom with the better view. The owner had left a bottle of local Malvasia in the fridge, which I opened with the efficiency of someone who had been thinking about it since Zagreb airport. We sat on the terrace as the sun went down, watching the swallows do their evening circuits, and my partner announced that getting lost had been "part of the plan all along." I let this pass.

The next morning, determined to actually find our way somewhere deliberately, we set off for Vodnjan town itself. We found it, eventually, after taking a wrong turn that led us to a small harbour where an old man was mending nets and listening to what sounded like Croatian jazz radio. He waved us back in the direction we had come with the resigned air of someone who had redirected many lost tourists in his time. Vodnjan, when we finally arrived, was lovely in that slightly crumbling, unhurried way that British towns rarely manage. We had coffee in a square where the main entertainment was watching three cats have a complicated territorial dispute, then wandered into a church that apparently contains mummified saints, which was not something I had prepared for before eleven in the morning.

The real discovery, though, came from another wrong turn on the way back. A dirt track, chosen partly because the Panda's suspension had already suffered so much damage that further indignity seemed irrelevant, led us to a tiny bay that I am fairly certain does not appear on any official map. There was no beach as such, just rocks and clear water and a fisherman who nodded at us as if we were expected. We swam, badly in my case, and lay on the warm stone like lizards, and I had one of those moments of gentle self-reflection that holidays sometimes permit. I spend so much of ordinary life trying to be efficient, to optimise routes and outcomes, and here I was having the best day of the trip because I had absolutely no idea where I was.

We found two more accidental spots in the following days. A konoba, one of those traditional Istrian taverns, that appeared after we took a "scenic alternative" that was definitely just a road to someone's vineyard. The owner brought out plates of prsut and cheese without us ordering, and talked at length about olive oil in a mixture of German and gestures while his dog slept under our table. Another time, a path that looked like it led somewhere interesting led instead to an abandoned stone house with fig trees growing through the roof, the fruit so ripe it was dropping onto the floor with soft, regular thuds.

By the end of the week, we had stopped using the sat-nav altogether. The Panda had developed a concerning rattle that we chose to interpret as character. We never did learn the name of that first bay, or the fisherman, or whether the konoba actually had a name or was just "the place with the good prsut." On our final evening, back on the terrace at Golubovo, my partner raised a glass and said something about the journey mattering more than the destination, which I would have found insufferable on day one but now, sun-tired and slightly wine-happy, seemed basically true. I still maintain that the sat-nav was rubbish, though.