The thing about driving onto Krk island is that you expect the bridge to feel like an event, and it does, but nothing prepared me for what happened immediately after. We had been on the road since Zagreb, the kids were feral, and my partner had that particular glaze in his eyes that suggested he was mentally composing his will. I was navigating, which should have been the first red flag. I told him to turn left at the roundabout. He turned right. We ended up in a car park belonging to a very closed supermarket, and I am still not entirely sure how.

Forty minutes of bickering later, we found the lane. Proper Croatia lanes, the sort that make you question every life choice that led you to hire a family saloon rather than a donkey. Olive trees everywhere. The smell of something herbal and warm drifting through the open windows. And then the house itself, this solid stone thing with shutters that looked like they had seen off several centuries of weather and at least one questionable renovation.

The key was in a lockbox, which sounds straightforward until you realise none of us had functioning data to check the code. My daughter suggested trying birthdays. My son suggested brute force. I stood there in the afternoon heat, slowly losing the will to live, until my partner remembered he had screenshot the instructions. Of course he had. Three weeks of me nagging about screenshots, and the one time it mattered, he actually came through. I did not thank him properly. I was too busy falling through the front door into the coolest, most welcome darkness I have ever experienced.

Stone houses in Kvarner Bay understand heat in a way modern builds simply do not. The walls were thick enough to stage a small revolution. The floors were that polished concrete that feels briefly alarming under bare feet, then perfect. The kitchen opened straight onto a terrace, and the terrace opened straight onto a view of olive groves dropping down towards the sea, which I had not expected because my navigation had been so catastrophically wrong earlier that I assumed we were facing a car park.

I will be honest. The first hour was chaos. The children discovered the pool and became possessed. My partner disappeared to find the fuse box because someone, possibly me, had overloaded something with a hairdryer and the kettle simultaneously. I stood on that terrace with a warm can of something from the car, too tired to find the fridge, and watched the light change over the bay. It was that particular Kvarner light, soft and golden and slightly unreal, the sort that makes you forgive yourself for being the sort of person who gets lost on a single island.

By evening we had established a system. The children were pruned and starving. I had located the proper coffee maker and felt genuinely emotional about it. We walked to the nearest konoba, which took ten minutes down a lane that smelled of wild fennel and woodsmoke, and ate grilled fish that had probably been swimming that morning. The kids complained about bones and I did not care. The wine was cold and local and slightly too easy to drink.

Walking back in the dark, the crickets were deafening. My son wanted to know if there were scorpions. My daughter wanted to know why we could not live here forever. I wanted to know why I had spent so many holidays in places with proper pavements and tourist information centres, when this existed. The stone house waited for us, warm yellow light in the windows, the pool reflecting stars we could actually see.

That first night I slept better than I had in months. Something about the weight of the walls, the absolute silence, the faint smell of lavender that seemed to come from nowhere in particular. I woke to my partner already making coffee, the children already in the pool, and the realisation that I had no idea what day it was and absolutely no intention of finding out.