We arrived at Costa Rei in late October, and I immediately knew the season had already turned its back on summer. The flight from Gatwick had been painless enough, but the real comedy began when I confidently strode up to what I thought was our hire car in Cagliari airport car park, chucked our cases in the boot, and only realised my mistake when a bewildered Italian businessman appeared tapping his watch. Wrong silver Fiat, wrong parking bay, wrong everything except my unshakeable British certainty. My wife still brings it up at dinner parties.

The drive east took about an hour, and you could see the landscape shifting with every mile. The summer crowds had long scattered, leaving the coastal road almost embarrassingly empty. Where July would have you crawling behind campervans and queues for gelato, we sailed past ochre hills and granite outcrops with only the occasional tractor for company. The cork oaks looked tired, their leaves that dusty green that comes before winter proper sets in. Everything felt slightly apologetic, as if Sardinia was catching its breath after the August madness.

Costa Rei itself greeted us with a stiff breeze and a beach that stretched for miles in either direction, completely deserted. In peak season this place would be umbrella-to-umbrella, the sand barely visible beneath towels and inflatable crocodiles. Now the wind had sculpted ripples and ridges, little Sahara landscapes in miniature, and the only footprints were our own, already being erased by the gathering dusk. The temperature hovered around eighteen degrees, warm enough if you kept moving, but the sea itself looked thoroughly uninvited. I paddled for approximately seven seconds before my ankles went numb. My wife, sensibly, stayed fully clothed and took photographs of my retreat.

The property sat back from the beach among low Mediterranean scrub, and the seasonal quiet meant we could hear the sea from the terrace even with all doors closed. The owner had left us a bottle of Cannonau and some slightly wrinkled figs from her garden, the last of the harvest she explained when we met her the next morning. She seemed relieved to have someone to talk to, the summer rental machine having wound down to almost nothing. In July she would have been handing over keys with industrial efficiency; now she spent twenty minutes recommending a shepherd in the hills who still made proper pecorino before the flocks came down for winter.

That evening we walked to the small cluster of shops and restaurants near the beach, finding most of them shuttered with handwritten notes promising return in April. The one pizzeria still open had perhaps six tables occupied, mostly locals, and the waiter seemed genuinely surprised to see us. We ate slowly, watching the last of the daylight leak from the sky, and I found myself unexpectedly moved by this autumnal version of a place I had only ever imagined in its summer prime. There was something honest about it, stripped of performance, just the bones of a beautiful coastline getting on with being itself.

The morning brought grey skies and spots of rain, and we made coffee and sat under the covered terrace watching the weather come in from the sea. In summer you would have been out by eight, fighting for position, calculating sunscreen. Now we lingered over breakfast until nearly eleven, reading books we had actually packed and intended to finish. The season had forced a different rhythm upon us, slower and more contemplative, and I realised with some embarrassment how rarely I allowed holidays to be anything other than frantic accumulation of experiences.

By our fourth day a proper storm had rolled through, and we spent an afternoon driving the coastal road simply to be moving, watching the waves throw themselves against rocks with theatrical violence. We stopped at a beach bar that was technically closed but whose owner opened up for coffee when he saw us peering through the window. He spoke no English, my Italian extends to ordering wine and apologising, but we managed a perfectly satisfactory conversation about the football and the price of diesel. Seasonal solitude creates these unexpected intimacies; in August we would have been one of hundreds he served without registering.

The week ended with a single perfect day, twenty-two degrees and still as a held breath, and we spent it walking the full length of the beach to the rocky point where the sand gives way entirely. I swam properly then, though the water still took my breath away, and lay on the warm stone feeling the stored summer heat seep back into my bones. It felt earned somehow, this moment of Mediterranean perfection, precisely because it had not been guaranteed. The season had made us work for it, had tested our willingness to find pleasure in quieter, rougher forms.

Driving back to Cagliari I felt a complicated gratitude. Costa Rei in late October is not the Sardinia of postcards and travel supplements, all turquoise water and bronzed bodies. It is something more provisional and interesting, a place negotiating its own transition, and it asks you to meet it on those terms. I thought of my silver Fiat confusion at the airport, my habitual assumption that I knew exactly what I was looking for, and smiled at my own slow education. The best holidays, I am gradually learning, are the ones that surprise you into paying proper attention.