I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I managed to leave my walking boots on the driveway back in Manchester. There I was, three hours into a flight to Ljubljana, smugly packed for a week of coastal hiking in Portoroz, when the awful realisation hit me like a misplaced suitcase on a carousel. My trusty, worn-in boots were sitting by the garage door, probably wondering where I'd gone. My partner found this absolutely hilarious. I found it less so, given I'd spent the previous fortnight breaking them in.

The drive down to the Coast and Karst region took about ninety minutes from the airport, winding through green hills that gradually gave way to glimpses of blue. By the time we pulled into Portoroz Lucija, I'd convinced myself that a pair of borrowed trainers would do just fine. Optimism, as it turns out, is a powerful drug.

The property sat tucked away in a quiet spot, close enough to hear the sea if you strained, surrounded by those characteristic Mediterranean plants that make everything smell faintly of rosemary and salt. I stepped out of the car and immediately felt that warm Adriatic air wrap around me like a well-worn blanket. It was late May, and the weather had been glorious for weeks, according to the owner who popped over to hand us the keys. "Perfect for walking," she said, smiling. I beamed back, still blissfully unaware of what my footwear situation would soon entail.

We dumped our bags and did what any sensible person would do after a morning of travel: headed straight for the Parenzana trail. This old railway path runs along the coast, flat and forgiving, threading through olive groves and past little villages that seem to have dozed off sometime in the 1950s and never quite woken up. The sun sat high and warm, and I strode along in my trainers feeling rather pleased with myself. The boots were forgotten. The boots were irrelevant. The boots were, I would later admit, deeply missed.

The path took us past Strunjan, where the cliffs drop dramatically to the water, and we stopped at a little viewpoint to watch a handful of sailboats drifting about with the kind of purposelessness I immediately envied. My partner produced a flask of coffee. I produced a blister on my left heel. We agreed not to mention it.

By day three, the weather had shifted. Not dramatically, not unpleasantly, but enough to change the rhythm of things. The mornings stayed warm and golden, perfect for early walks before the heat built. But the afternoons brought a hazy stillness, a thickness to the air that made strenuous hiking feel like wading through warm soup. We adapted, as you do. Up at six, out by seven, back for a lazy lunch and a doze in the shade of the property's terrace.

I found myself strangely grateful for the change. There's something about being forced to slow down that strips away the holiday checklist mentality. We wandered the salt pans at Secovlje one morning, watching the still pools mirror the sky, and I realised I'd stopped thinking about mileage and started noticing things: the way the light caught on the salt crystals, the particular silence of that flat landscape, the heron standing motionless as a statue.

The trainers held up better than I deserved, though I did succumb and buy a cheap pair of walking sandals from a shop in Piran. My partner photographed this moment for posterity, naturally.

On our final morning, we rose early and walked the coast path one last time, the sun just clearing the horizon and turning everything rose-gold. My feet were sore, my pride slightly bruised, but I felt properly settled into the place in a way that rushing about never achieves. The warm weather had bent our plans, and my own foolishness had bent them further, and somehow the whole thing had become more memorable for it.

We left the property with the windows open, that salt-and-herb smell following us to the car. I checked three times that I had the new sandals. Some lessons, it seems, do eventually stick.