I have never been so grateful for a sat nav in my entire life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving vehicle quite so badly either. The journey from Ljubljana airport to our holiday home in the Coast and Karst region had been going swimmingly until we hit the Slovenian countryside, where our trusty GPS decided that a farm track barely wide enough for a determined sheep was definitely the main road to our destination. Cue twenty minutes of me white-knuckling the steering wheel, my partner reading the map upside down, and a very confused-looking farmer who definitely did not expect to find a British family in a rental Fiat pointing hopefully at his hay barn.

We arrived at the property in late October, when the summer crowds had long since packed up their beach towels and the Adriatic coast had settled into something far more interesting. The first thing that struck me was the light, that particular autumn quality where everything looks slightly golden and nostalgic, as if the world has put a filter on just for your benefit. The house sat quietly among trees that were doing their best impression of a firework display, reds and oranges against the pale stone walls that characterise this corner of Slovenia.

The seasonal timing shaped everything about those first few hours. The pool, which I imagine buzzes with activity in July, sat covered and still, a mirror reflecting the changing leaves above. I felt a peculiar mixture of relief and disappointment about this, the kind of contradictory emotion that autumn seems to specialise in producing. We would not be doing any of the swimming and sunbathing that the brochure photographs suggested, yet there was something deeply satisfying about unpacking our jumpers and lighting the wood burner while the afternoon light faded earlier than we were used to.

I stepped out onto the terrace with a cup of tea that first evening, and the temperature drop hit me properly. The coast here is mild compared to back home, but October evenings still carry a proper bite, that coastal wind coming in from the Gulf of Trieste with a reminder that winter is not far off. The garden smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke from somewhere nearby, and the cicadas of summer had given way to an almost complete silence, broken only by the occasional rustle of leaves giving up their grip on branches.

The local shop in the nearby village was operating on what I can only describe as autumn hours, which is to say somewhat unpredictable and clearly governed by whether the owner felt like opening at all. We managed to secure some provisions for dinner, though my attempt at asking for bread in my phrasebook Slovenian resulted in being handed what I am fairly certain was a local spirit instead. We ate outside anyway, wrapped in blankets we found in a cupboard, watching our breath mingle with the steam from our soup.

That first night, lying in bed listening to the different quality of silence that comes with cooler weather, I found myself reflecting on how rarely I travel outside the obvious summer window. There is a particular pressure, I think, to experience places at their supposed best, their most photogenic, their most sociable. Yet here I was, in a house designed for outdoor living, finding something perhaps more genuine in its autumnal stillness. The coast in October does not perform for you. It simply exists, slightly worn around the edges, comfortable in its own skin, asking nothing more than that you match its slower rhythm.

I woke to mist the next morning, the sea invisible beyond the trees, and the realisation that I had absolutely no idea what the day might hold. It felt like the proper beginning of something, rather than the continuation of an expectation.