I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good when it tried to send me through what looked like someone's vegetable patch. Three hours from Ljubljana Airport, and there I was, crawling along a narrow lane near Koper with a hire car the size of a small boat, convinced I was about to become intimately acquainted with a Slovenian grandmother's tomato vines. The property owner had warned me about the final turn being tricky. "Look for the olive trees," she'd said. I found the olive trees, alright. I also found a low stone wall that I may or may not have scraped along with a noise like a cat being strangled. First impressions of my Koper Plavje holiday home? I hadn't even reached the door, and I was already praying the damage deposit wouldn't cover a whole new bumper.

The thing about the Coast and Karst region is that it doesn't announce itself. You think you're lost, and then suddenly the Mediterranean winks at you through a gap in the hills. That was how I found the house proper, not by following directions but by giving up on them entirely. I'd pulled over to swear at the Sat Nav in peace, turned off the engine, and there it was, a modest stone building with shutters the colour of faded terracotta, half-hidden by fig trees that were absolutely dropping with fruit. The owner had left the key under a pot that contained a very alive and judgmental-looking lizard. I named him Gregor. He watched me fumble with the lock for a solid five minutes.

Inside, the place smelled of wood polish and something faintly herbal, rosemary perhaps, drifting in through open windows. The kitchen was simple, functional, the sort of space that makes you immediately want to buy local cheese and pretend you can cook. I dumped my bags, still slightly adrenalised from the wall incident, and decided to explore on foot before I lost the light. This was where the real trouble started, or the real magic, depending on your perspective.

I walked down what I thought was a path and ended up in someone's vineyard. Not a tourist vineyard, mind you, but a proper working one, with an elderly man in a faded cap who simply nodded at me as if strangers wandering through his grapes were a daily occurrence. He pointed toward the sea, or what I assumed was the sea, and muttered something in Slovenian that I chose to interpret as "that way, you fool." I went that way. The fool way.

The path narrowed, became rocky, turned into something that required actual concentration. And then, without any warning, I stumbled into a cove that I am still half-convinced does not officially exist. Tiny pebbles, water so clear it looked like glass, not a single sun lounger or ice cream vendor in sight. I sat on a rock like a man who had discovered a secret, which of course I hadn't, but it felt that way. Gregor the lizard would have understood. Some places you find only by being slightly incompetent at following instructions.

Walking back in the dark, I got lost again, properly this time, circling the same olive grove three times until I recognised my own tyre marks from the afternoon's wall encounter. There was something quietly humbling about it, this foreign landscape refusing to be mastered by my app-based confidence. I arrived back at the Plavje house with scratched legs, a pocket full of figs I couldn't identify as definitely wild, and a strange contentment I hadn't expected.

That first evening, I sat on the terrace with a bottle of local Refosk that I'd bought from a petrol station, because apparently even Slovenian petrol stations have excellent wine, and I watched the lights of Koper flicker in the distance. The Sat Nav sat inside, sulking. Gregor had disappeared, presumably to judge someone else. Somewhere out there were more paths I would misunderstand, more coves I would accidentally trespass toward, more locals who would tolerate my wandering with gentle indifference. I raised my glass to all of it, to the getting lost and the finding, to stone walls that teach humility and olive trees that never move no matter how badly you need a landmark.

The bumper, incidentally, was fine. More or less.