I should have known the satnav was up to no good when it tried to send me through a vineyard. There I was, winding through the Slovenian countryside in my hire car, convinced I was taking the scenic route to our Koper Ankaran holiday let, when the tarmac simply stopped and a very confused-looking goat became my new windscreen companion. Twenty minutes of reversing later, I finally found the actual road and pulled up at the property with slightly more adrenaline than I'd planned for a Tuesday afternoon.

The first person I met was Marjan, the neighbour from the house next door, who had apparently watched my entire agricultural detour from his garden chair with a cup of coffee and what I can only describe as the patience of a man who has seen many British drivers ruin his view. "You like the grapes?" he called out, deadpan, before I'd even opened the car door. I admitted they were lovely. He nodded slowly, as if storing this information for future village entertainment.

Marjan turned out to be the unofficial welcome committee, though his methods were unconventional. He insisted on helping with the bags, then spent ten minutes explaining the bin system with the gravity of a man describing nuclear codes. "Blue is for clean plastic," he said, holding my eye contact far longer than necessary. "Not dirty. Not once dirty. Clean." I nodded vigorously, already terrified of my own rubbish.

The property itself was one of those cheerful yellow coastal houses that seem to glow in the afternoon light, with a terrace that looked out towards the Gulf of Trieste. But I barely got to admire it before Marjan introduced me to his wife, Dragica, who emerged with a plate of prsut and a series of questions that felt less like small talk and more like a citizenship test. Where was I from? Did I know it rained there? Had I tried their wine? No? This was remedied immediately with a glass of Refosk that made me realise I'd been drinking grape juice back home.

Dragica had opinions about everything, delivered with the confidence of someone who had never once doubted herself. The local shop? Overpriced. The new restaurant in Ankaran? "For tourists." My driving? Implied with a raised eyebrow and a gesture towards the vineyard. I found myself agreeing with everything, slightly drunk on strong red wine and stronger personality.

By evening, a third character appeared: their grandson, Luka, a teenager who spoke perfect English from watching YouTube and seemed faintly embarrassed by the entire operation. "They do this to everyone," he muttered, though he translated patiently when Dragica launched into a story about the 1980s and some disputed land boundary that still animated her thirty years later. Marjan interjected occasionally with corrections that Dragica ignored entirely.

I woke the next morning to find a bag of tomatoes on my doorstep, no note, just the produce. The bin remained mysteriously emptied. On the terrace with my coffee, Marjan waved from his garden chair, already positioned for the day's entertainment, and I realised with a start that I was probably it. But as the morning haze lifted over the Adriatic and Dragica's voice carried across the fence with some new pronouncement about the weather, I found myself grinning into my cup. Some holidays you remember for the views. This one, I suspected, would be about the people who refused to let me simply have one.