I should have known the sat nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's vegetable patch just outside Ljubljana. Fourteen hours after leaving Kent, three motorway services of questionable coffee quality, and one spectacular argument with a toll booth machine later, I finally spotted the signs for Izola. My partner was asleep in the passenger seat, mouth slightly open, completely unaware that I had just taken us on a scenic detour through what I now suspect was a vineyard. I decided not to mention it.

The thing about driving to Slovenia is that you forget how dramatically the landscape shifts. One minute you are winding through alpine-looking hills, the next the air smells of salt and fig trees and something indefinably Mediterranean. I wound down the window and nearly woke my other half with my overly enthusiastic sniffing. The coast here is not the dramatic cliffs of Cornwall or the pebbled austerity of parts of France. It is gentler, somehow sleepier, with towns that creep right down to fishing harbours and apartment blocks painted in faded terracottas and creams.

Finding the property was straightforward enough, though I did manage to reverse into a very small and extremely judgmental hedge while trying to read the house number. The sat nav, by now thoroughly pleased with itself, announced we had arrived approximately four minutes after I actually needed that information. I extracted myself from the hedge with what dignity I could muster and woke my partner with the classic holiday arrival technique of opening their door and letting the seatbelt retract with a snap.

The apartment was on the first floor of a low-rise building, the sort you see everywhere along this stretch of coast, neither aggressively modern nor charmingly ancient but somewhere comfortably in between. I fumbled with the key box code, having written it on my phone, then on a receipt, then apparently nowhere at all. After several increasingly panicked attempts, I found it scrawled on the back of a petrol station loyalty card. Organisation has never been my strong suit. I once packed for a walking holiday in Scotland and forgot walking boots. This was, relatively speaking, a triumph.

Stepping inside, the first thing that hit me was the coolness. Whoever designed this place understood that Slovenian summers are not messing about. Tiled floors, shutters that actually function, air conditioning that hummed rather than roared. I have stayed in enough rental properties to develop a finely tuned sense of when somewhere is going to work out, and something about the smell of clean linen and the faint lemony cleaner scent told me we were in safe hands. The kitchen was compact but not insultingly so, the sort where you could actually prepare a meal without performing an elaborate dance of elbows and apologies. A small balcony overlooked communal gardens where someone had planted olive trees in pots, and beyond them I could glimpse a slice of the Adriatic that made me forget entirely about the hedge incident.

My partner emerged from inspecting the bedroom with the satisfied expression that means the mattress has passed the sit-down test. I poured us both glasses of water from the fridge, which was stocked with nothing but the welcome feeling of actually working properly, and we stood on that balcony in comfortable silence. Somewhere nearby, probably at the marina, a bell was clanging with the unhurried rhythm of a place that has never heard of rush hour.

I thought about the journey, the vineyard detour I would eventually confess to, the toll booth I had verbally abused in two languages. All of it felt worthwhile now, watching the light turn golden on those potted olive trees, listening to my partner hum something tuneless and contented beside me. Sometimes the mishaps are what you remember, and sometimes they are simply what gets you to the moment where you stop caring about them.