I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life. There I was, winding through the hills above Kvarner Bay, convinced I was following the coastal road to Novalja, when the thing started insisting I take a sharp left onto what can only be described as a goat track. I ignored it. Twice. The third time it piped up, I relented, mostly because the fuel light had begun its ominous amber glow and I had spotted precisely zero petrol stations since leaving the mainland ferry at Prizna. Ten minutes of white-knuckling it down a lane barely wider than the hire car, I emerged onto a proper road and found myself staring at the sea, the island of Pag spread out before me like someone had dropped a crumpled sheet of pale limestone into the Adriatic. The sat nav, it turned out, had known exactly what it was doing. I apologised to it aloud. The car remained silent in its judgment.

This was late September, that curious window where the summer crowds have thinned but the sea still holds its warmth like a secret. I had deliberately aimed for this shoulder season, having endured a July in Dalmatia some years back that felt less like a holiday and more like participating in a human migration study. The ferry crossing had already confirmed my suspicions: instead of the frantic queueing and horn-honking I remembered, there had been a leisurely loading, a handful of cars, and an almost apologetic departure. The deck had been mine to wander, the wind properly bracing, the sort that makes you glad you kept your jacket within reach rather than buried under the suitcase.

The property sat on the outskirts of Novalja, one of those modern Croatian holiday homes that manage to look both contemporary and somehow rooted in the landscape. What struck me first was the quiet. Not silence exactly, but the particular hush of a place that has recently shed its busiest self. The pool, which in peak season would have been a churn of inflatable flamingos and competitive splashing, lay there inviting and undisturbed, its surface mirroring a sky that seemed to hold more blue than I had seen in months. The garden had that slightly tired, end-of-season look, a few dried leaves skittering across the terrace, but the lavender bushes were still putting out their last determined flowers, and the air carried their scent mixed with something saltier from the bay below.

I dumped my bags with the overenthusiasm of someone who has spent six hours in transit and immediately made for the outdoor kitchen. This is a feature I have decided all British properties should adopt by law. There was something almost illicit about grilling fish outdoors in late September, as if I were getting away with something the calendar had not properly authorised. The sun, lower now than it would have been in August, cast long shadows across the terrace by early evening, and I found myself pulling on a jumper not out of necessity but anticipation, the temperature dropping in that gentle, Mediterranean way that feels like a courtesy rather than an assault.

The local shop in Novalja still had its tourist-facing shelves stocked, though the proprietor admitted he was already ordering in the heartier items, the winter provisions, the things locals actually wanted. We had a conversation about this, standing in the doorway as the light faded, him explaining how the rhythm of the place shifted now, how the weekenders from Zagreb would still come through October, how the fishermen's routines became the dominant pulse rather than the nightclub schedule that drives summer. I bought some prsut and cheese and a bottle of local Zlahtina, feeling faintly smug about my timing, about having slipped into this interlude between the performance of high season and the closed-up quiet of winter.

That first evening, I sat by the pool long after I would have retreated indoors in Britain, the water still faintly warm from the day's sun, the sky doing that prolonged Croatian sunset thing where the colours seem to hesitate, reluctant to depart. A gecko appeared on the wall, motionless, presumably also appreciating the lull. I raised my glass to it. It did not respond. Some company, I have learned, is simply about mutual presence rather than interaction.

The mishap of the goat track had become, within hours, the perfect introduction. It had slowed me down, forced me to notice the change in vegetation, the shift from green mainland to this stonier, more austere island terrain. September had done something similar to the whole place, decelerated it, stripped back the layers of performance to reveal something more durable underneath. I had come for the swimming and the seafood and the promise of still-warm days. What I found, immediately and overwhelmingly, was the particular grace of arriving somewhere just as it exhales.