Last week I was in Croatia, mainly staying in what the local tourist board classifies as hostels, although that's not as adventurous as it sounds.

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Lynne, who fixes our itinerary on the net, thinks that being at the beating heart of things is more important than having a swimming pool or an optional dry-cleaning facility and Croatian hostels, although rather basic, are not hostels in the sense of 'back-packer' or 'probation' and have working showers and toilets – which admittedly can be rather noisy, the plumbing being generally below Holiday Inn standards.

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But what the Lynne Travel Company's cheap rooms tend to lack most is lifts. This is unfortunate because in historic city centre buildings, which can't be knocked around to accommodate lifts, the cheap rooms are always at the top.

In Amsterdam, where old houses are notoriously tall and thin, we had to climb so many narrow and precipitous steps that by the time we got to the top we couldn't impress people by telling them how many steps we'd climbed because, what with the oxygen deprivation, we'd lost count.

Lynne once managed to find a room with a lift in a very high building in Barcelona but it turned out to have cheap-room electrics, meaning that if the lift was at the top, the only way to call it down would have been to climb dozens of steps then press a button at the top.

The same sometimes happened in reverse going up-to-down and once the lift got stuck in the middle so that we had to call the landlord, who luckily lived only a neighbouring province away.

However, in Split, Croatia – which would be one of the ugliest cities on the Adriatic if it wasn't the site of the Roman Emperor Diocletian's retirement palace – Lynne found a liftless room only two moderately-high storeys up.

The citadel-sized palace has been built over many times so that what mainly remains is a few notable buildings such as Diocletian's mausoleum (now the cathedral), a higgledy-piggledy street plan and most of the palace walls.

Our hostel building was slotted, ages ago, into a corner of the palace walls, making parts of it fourth century – including, by the feel of it, the staircase; at every step the treads bowed like a trampoline and steadying yourself on the rickety banisters would have introduced you to the bottom of the stone stairwell very quickly. Really, I said to Lynne, we need to get this cheap-holiday-staircase thing sorted or try to stay in flatter places.

But at the top of the stairs was one of the most delightful rooms I've ever stayed in, with the West Gate of Diocletian's palace just outside the window and below a twist of alleyways, cafes and people.

The owner, a young bohemian type, had an impressive collection of original paintings but he told us, opening the bathroom door very respectfully, as if he was about to reveal Tutankhamen's tomb, that the thing he felt most proud of was the fridge.

Actually it wasn't a fridge, it was a chilled display cabinet brightly decorated in blue, yellow and pink to advertise some chilled product (soft drink? yoghurt? …the drawback with the Croat language is that it seldom gives English speakers any clues to meaning at all).

We gasped at its bright plastic beauty, particularly when set against the rough, stripped, rather dull Roman masonry of the bathroom wall, then we gasped again when he told us, with great pride, that he had got it absolutely free from a shopkeeper friend of his.

I think he recognised in us fellow spirits; the sort of people who think getting something for free, or at least cheap, as the Split hostel was, is much cleverer and more interesting than staying in the Hilton and even if it isn't, it's still cheaper.

I'm going to try and find a similar refrigerated display cabinet myself in order to mislead people into thinking I'm interesting – someone in a wacky American sitcom, for example, or a Rhys Ifans-like character in a play I don't really understand.