I have never been so relieved to see a set of keys in a plastic box as I was when we finally rocked up to our holiday let in Icici. The journey from Rijeka Airport had been straightforward enough, a hire car, a coastal road, the odd dramatic view of Kvarner Bay making me go slightly misty-eyed. Then my phone died. Not the phone itself, you understand, but the charging cable, which I had somehow managed to pack from our kitchen drawer at home without noticing it was for a completely different device. My partner gave me that look. You know the one. The look that says "we have been together eleven years and you still do this."

So there we were, circling Icici like lost seagulls, no sat nav, relying on my increasingly shaky memory of the directions I had skimmed that morning over airport coffee. We found the place eventually, of course. A kind local walking his dog took pity on two Brits arguing in a parked Fiat and pointed us the right way. The apartment was up a modest hill, nothing too punishing, with a balcony that looked out over the bay towards Opatija. I stood there with my tea, feeling rather pleased with myself, as if I had personally arranged the sunshine and the pine-scented air.

The next morning I woke with grand plans. I had read about the Lungomare, that wonderful coastal footpath that threads along Kvarner Bay, and I had decided we would walk the stretch from Icici to Opatija and back before lunch. Ambitious, perhaps, but I had packed proper walking boots and everything. We set off in high spirits, the sea glittering to our left, the morning still cool enough to be pleasant.

By the time we reached Lovran, about four kilometres along, the sky had begun to do that thing Mediterranean skies sometimes do. One minute blue, the next assembling grey clouds with theatrical speed. We pressed on. I am British, after all. A bit of weather never hurt anyone. Then it properly tipped down. Not English drizzle, that soft persistent soaking you can almost ignore. This was sudden, biblical, the kind of rain that bounces off stone and finds its way into every supposedly waterproof seam. We sheltered under a pine tree that offered roughly the protection of a colander, laughing despite ourselves, already damp through.

We turned back. There is a particular humility in abandoning a walk, in admitting that the weather has won, that your carefully planned route is now just a soggy map in your pocket. We squelched back to Icici, stopped at a konoba for coffee and a restorative strudel, and watched the storm blow itself out over the bay. The sun returned by mid-afternoon, shamelessly bright, as if nothing had happened.

The following days brought more of the same meteorological drama. We learned to set out early, to carry a proper waterproof rather than the emergency poncho I had optimistically stuffed in my rucksack, to read the clouds gathering over Ucka mountain with the wariness of seasoned locals. We walked shorter sections, Icici to Medveja one morning, a gentle loop through the hills behind the village another. Each time the weather held off just long enough, or caught us briefly, sending us ducking into a cafe or a church porch until it passed.

There is something about walking in changeable weather that strips away any pretence of control. You become porous, adaptable, alive to small pleasures. A dry patch under an olive tree. The particular green of pine needles after rain. The way the bay looks utterly different under cloud, grey and dramatic and somehow more honest than in the brochure sunshine.

On our final morning we walked the Lungomare to Opatija at last, setting out in mist that gradually burned away to reveal the town's elegant Habsburg architecture, the gardens, the grand hotels. We sat on a bench with takeaway coffee, legs tired, skin slightly weather-beaten, and I thought about how the ruined plans had become the holiday itself. The abandoned routes, the damp sandwiches eaten under inadequate shelter, the laughter that comes from shared mild misfortune. I am still the person who packs the wrong cable, who sets off too ambitiously, who trusts the sky to stay blue. But I am learning, slowly, to enjoy the walking anyway, whatever the weather decides to do.