I'd never been to Krk before, which is probably why I spent the entire flight from Gatwick pronouncing it "Kirk" like the captain from Star Trek. My partner finally leaned over somewhere above Slovenia and whispered that it's actually more like "Kur-k," which made me feel about as cultured as a Pot Noodle. Still, I practised it under my breath for the rest of the descent, determined not to embarrass myself at the car hire desk.

The embarrassments started without my help anyway. Pula Airport had been straightforward enough, but the two-hour drive up the coast to Kvarner Bay unravelled me completely. Croatian motorways are pristine things, all smooth tarmac and dramatic viaducts, yet I somehow missed the Krk bridge turn-off and found myself heading toward Rijeka with the stubborn confidence of a man who definitely does not need to ask for directions. Forty minutes later, after a sweaty U-turn at a petrol station where I bought a suspiciously warm Fanta and some crisps I didn't want, we finally crossed that famous bridge to the island. It's a stunner, by the way, that concrete arch spanning the Adriatic like someone built it specifically for holiday brochure photographs. I was too busy swearing at my phone's GPS to appreciate it properly.

The property, a proper old stone house in a village just outside Krk town, sat down a narrow lane that my Fiat Panda had absolutely no business attempting. I scraped the wing mirror against a wall within thirty seconds, which set the tone nicely. The key safe code the agency sent worked on the third attempt because I'd been reading a six upside-down, and I stood there in the afternoon heat jiggling numbers like I was trying to crack a bank vault.

Then the door opened, and something shifted.

The chaos of the journey fell away embarrassingly fast. The place smelled of stone and dried lavender, that particular cool scent of old Croatian houses that no air freshener has ever successfully replicated. Terracotta floors, wooden beams darkened by decades of wood smoke, furniture that had actually been lived with rather than assembled from flat-pack instructions. I wandered through to the kitchen, which had one of those proper gas hobs that terrify me slightly, and beyond it the terrace with its view down toward the bay.

That's when I noticed the fig tree.

It grew right beside the terrace, heavy with fruit not quite ready, and I immediately decided this made the entire property exceptional regardless of anything else. I have no particular feelings about figs. I just liked that it was there, ancient and indifferent to my arrival, doing its slow arboreal thing while I flapped about with suitcases and wrong turns.

My partner found me twenty minutes later, still on that terrace, warm Fanta in hand, staring at the water. I hadn't unpacked a thing. The scrape on the car mirror suddenly seemed like a fair exchange for this particular view, those particular shadows moving across the stone houses below. I'd spent the whole day getting everything slightly wrong, and here was this place, patient and solid, waiting without any particular urgency for me to catch up with myself.

The Fanta was still warm. I drank it anyway, watching the evening come in across Kvarner Bay, already knowing I'd remember this particular foolish arrival far longer than any smooth journey could have offered.