I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when my phone decided Portoroz was actually in Croatia. There I was, sat in the passenger seat, smugly directing my other half down what I insisted was a "scenic shortcut" through the Slovenian countryside, only to find myself waving at a confused border guard who looked like he'd seen this particular flavour of British incompetence before. Forty minutes of apologetic gesturing later, we finally rolled into Portoroz Lucija, me slightly pinker in the cheeks than the rose I'd been dreaming about since Gatwick.

The apartment itself was one of those unassuming holiday lets that reveals its charms slowly, like someone at a party who turns out to be properly funny once they've had half a pint. Ours had a balcony that caught the afternoon sun just so, and I immediately claimed it as my reading territory while my partner fussed about with the coffee maker. But it was the getting lost that made the place, really. Properly, gloriously lost.

We'd set out for what the map called a "coastal path" and ended up somewhere that definitely wasn't on any map I'd brought. The thing about the Coast and Karst region is that it sort of folds in on itself, little inlets and wooded bits that feel secret even when they're probably not. We stumbled down a track between two houses that looked abandoned, followed it through some scrubby pines, and suddenly there was this tiny cove, not much bigger than a generous garden pond, with water so clear you could count the pebbles. No signage, no ice cream van, just a local bloke fishing who nodded at us like we were late to a meeting he'd been expecting.

That became our pattern, if you can call aimless wandering a pattern. We'd head out with some vague intention - a bakery someone mentioned, a view we'd read about - and promptly ignore it. Down near Lucija's marina area, where the bigger boats sit looking expensive, we took a wrong turn past a closed-up hotel and found a courtyard where an old woman was selling honey from her own hives. She spoke about four words of English, I speak precisely zero Slovenian, but through pointing and smiling and a transaction that involved both of us laughing at my terrible attempt to count euros, I came away with a jar of something that tastes like the countryside smells. Wild thyme, she kept saying, or at least that's what I think she meant.

The self-reflection bit came one evening, sat on that balcony with the honey and some bread that was probably too fancy for what I was doing to it. I've always been the planner, the one with spreadsheets and backup restaurants and carefully timed museum visits. And here I'd spent three days achieving absolutely nothing on any itinerary, yet feeling fuller somehow. The mishap at the border stopped feeling embarrassing and started feeling like the theme of the whole trip. Wrong turns as the whole point.

We found a vineyard on our last morning, completely by accident, having given up on finding a particular beach the guidebook promised. Just followed a dirt road that looked interesting, which is not a sentence I would have written about myself six months ago. The owner, a chap called Bojan, was pruning vines and seemed genuinely delighted that two lost Brits had materialised. He poured us something white and sharp that made my eyes water pleasantly, and we stood there in the quiet, drinking wine at eleven in the morning, nowhere near where we were supposed to be.

I still don't know the name of that vineyard. Couldn't find it again if you paid me. That's rather the beauty of it, isn't it?