The sat nav had been insisting we were three minutes away from Opatija Poljane for the better part of twenty minutes, which I now realise should have been my first clue that Croatian country lanes do not bend to the will of British technology. My wife was navigating with her phone, I was gripping the steering wheel of our hired Fiat like it was the last lifeboat off the Titanic, and our two children had begun that ominous quiet that means either profound contentment or plotting something expensive.

We found the turning eventually, down a track that looked less like a road and more like a suggestion. The villa sat there in the late afternoon sun, all stone walls and terracotta roof, looking impossibly pleased with itself. I, meanwhile, was less composed. In my enthusiasm to stretch my legs and inspect our holiday home, I managed to trip over the single step leading to the terrace, scattering my carefully gathered travel documents across the lavender bushes like some kind of bureaucratic confetti. My son found this the funniest thing he had seen since his father attempted watersports in Cornwall three summers ago. I chose to style it out as a deliberate inspection of the local flora.

The first thing that strikes you about this corner of Kvarner Bay is the light. It falls differently here, thicker somehow, pooling in the olive groves and catching the distant glimmer of the Adriatic. Our villa had a terrace that seemed designed for exactly this hour, when the heat softens and the crickets begin their evening shift. My wife poured us both a glass of the local white wine she had wisely purchased at Rijeka airport, and we stood there in that particular silence of parents whose children have temporarily vanished into a new environment to explore.

The interior was exactly the sort of comfortable chaos a family needs. The kitchen opened onto the living space in that effortless Mediterranean way, and I immediately began planning breakfasts of local cheese and tomatoes that I would later fail to wake up early enough to prepare properly. The bedrooms were cool and simply furnished, with shutters that actually worked to keep out the morning sun, unlike our futile attempts at home with curtains purchased during a previous decade's questionable taste.

My daughter appeared from somewhere to announce she had found a lizard. My son followed to announce he had found three. They debated the relative merits of their discoveries with the intensity of art critics at a controversial exhibition, while I opened another bottle and decided that this was precisely the sort of domestic rhythm I had been craving.

The pool, I should mention, was the colour of a postcard. I had worried it might be one of those sad, chemical affairs that leave you smelling like a swimming lesson, but it was properly maintained, shaded by trees on one side and open to the sky on the other. The children were in it before I had finished my second glass, and I joined them eventually, still slightly embarrassed by my earlier performance with the lavender.

That first evening, we walked down to the nearest village, a ten-minute stroll that took twenty because we kept stopping to admire someone's bougainvillea or argue about whether a particular tree was fig or olive. We found a konoba, one of those family-run places where the menu depends on what was caught that morning, and ate grilled fish that tasted of actual sea while my daughter explained at length why she would be keeping a holiday journal despite having abandoned three previous attempts before February.

I remember watching my wife laughing at something the children had done, the wine slightly warm in my glass, and thinking that this was the version of myself I preferred. The one not checking work emails, not navigating school runs, not pretending to understand current affairs at dinner parties. Just a man in a slightly crumpled linen shirt, slightly sunburned, slightly too full of excellent fish, watching his family be entirely themselves in a place that asked nothing of us but our presence.

We walked back in darkness punctuated by the occasional villa light and the constant companion of cicadas. I did not trip this time, though my son kept a suspicious eye on me. The pool shimmered with reflected stars, and somewhere in the hills a dog barked once and thought better of it.

That was our first day at Opatija Poljane. I cannot promise every day was as peaceful, because family holidays contain their own particular storms, and our children are capable of arguing about literally anything including, memorably, the correct way to breathe. But that first evening established something. A rhythm of simple things. Morning swims. Late breakfasts. The walk to buy bread. The discovery that the local shop sells ice cream that makes my children momentarily agreeable. These small, repeating pleasures that accumulate into something larger than their parts.

I still have a photograph from that first sunset, my wife's wine glass catching the light, the children blurry in the background mid-chase. I look at it sometimes during grey English afternoons and remember who we were in that moment, and who I hope to be again.