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. There I was, winding through the karst landscape of southwestern Slovenia, convinced I was about to become an accidental trespasser in a region famous for its limestone plateaus and stubborn independence. The hire car, a Fiat with the acceleration of a sleepy tortoise, protested every incline as I followed increasingly narrow lanes past dry stone walls and the occasional suspicious goat.

The mishap came at a T-junction that definitely was not on any map I could see. I turned left when I should have turned right, which led me on a glorious twenty-minute detour through Skocjan's outskirts, past a farm where three dogs took personal offence at my existence, and into a village square where an elderly gentleman watering his geraniums watched me perform a seventeen-point turn with the expression of someone who had seen this particular foolishness many times before. I waved cheerfully. He did not wave back. By the time I found the actual turning for Obrov, I had sweated through my shirt and developed a deep philosophical grudge against GPS technology.

Then the house appeared, and my irritation evaporated faster than morning dew on limestone. Obrov sits in that particular Slovenian countryside where everything feels slightly timeless, the sort of place where you half expect to see a haycart round the corner. The stone building, weathered to a soft honey colour, had a terrace that immediately announced itself as the centre of all future operations. I dumped my bags with the enthusiasm of someone who had spent three hours driving from Ljubljana Airport via an unscheduled tour of rural wrong turns.

My first act of business was to claim a sun lounger before anyone else could. This was unnecessary paranoia, of course. The property, I quickly realised, offered the particular luxury of genuine quiet, broken only by birdsong and the occasional distant tractor. I stretched out with a book I had been pretending to read since March, discovered within three pages that I had no idea what was happening in the plot, and promptly fell asleep instead.

The afternoon drifted by in that delicious, unstructured way that proper holidays permit. I made coffee in the kitchen, which had the satisfying solidity of somewhere actually lived in rather than aggressively styled. I wandered to the edge of the property and looked out towards the Vipava Valley, where the haze made everything soft and slightly unreal. Somewhere in the distance, I knew, the Adriatic lurked, but that seemed almost too energetic a concept to contemplate.

I found myself thinking, as the sun moved across the terrace, about how rarely I permitted myself this particular flavour of idleness. Not the productive idleness of a scheduled spa day or a mindfulness app, but the genuine, slightly guilty, absolutely purposeless variety where you might read three pages, nap, make a snack, and repeat without any narrative arc whatsoever. The karst landscape, with its stubborn refusal to be rushed, seemed to encourage this. The stone walls were not going anywhere. The olive trees were not hurrying. Why should I?

By evening, I had achieved precisely nothing of note and felt utterly triumphant about it. I opened a bottle of local refosk, watched the light change on the terrace stones from gold to rose to grey, and decided that tomorrow would follow exactly the same pattern, perhaps with the addition of a walk to the village shop for more bread and cheese. The sat nav sat ignored in the car. I had arrived, eventually, and that was quite enough adventure for one day.