Your holiday disasters...

After The Storm is about a dream holiday which turns into something much darker. Given this TheWriteRomantics  decided to run a competition and the task was to describe your personal holiday disaster. The prize was one of two signed copies of After The Storm.  
My thanks to everyone who took part. It was great fun reading about collapsing tents, misplaced passports, and badly behaved weather.


WINNER
Jackie Ladbury, because although concise I thought Jackie captured this memory vividly. I could smell it:

Camping in a storm on the side of a hill in Anglesey with my sister years ago. Held on to the sides of the tent but it blew away in the early hours anyway, so ended up sleeping in the hatchback part of my sister’s car. Stupidly tried to cook breakfast in the hatchback with the boot open and one gust of wind blew into the Primus and set the back seat on fire. Farmer called the fire brigade and we eventually drove home at the end of the second day of our hols with a badly burned car that was also soaking wet. I can still remember the stench of burned, wet rubber and fabric that we had to endure for two hundred miles!


WINNER
Catriona Campbell for her terrific account of a disastrous Yoga holiday which could be the plot of a novel:

We’d just met and wanted a romantic post Christmas break. We also wanted to become healthier and I chanced upon an ad for a Yoga retreat in Lanzarote. Neither of us had ever tried yoga before.
The villa was beautiful with stunning garden and gorgeous views but after breakfast on the first morning we were gathered in the sunny conservatory and our hosts asked us to describe our ‘issues’ one by one.
Silly us, we hadn’t thought this holiday through at all. Everyone there apart from us was recently divorced, bereaved or in a state of depression and didn’t want to be alone over the Christmas break.
The only ‘issue’ we could come up with was that we wanted to stop smoking. Now off the hook we then made our way to the 1st yoga session by the pool. No warm up exercises just straight onto the poses; backbends , bridges and dogs were all involved.
2 hours later and I’m being booked in for sessions with the ‘resident’ chiropractor as I have hurt my back. No more yoga for me.
The rest of the week involved us trying to keep as far away from the villa as possible in between the chiropractor walking all over me and our fellow guests sharing their sad tales over late boozy nights. If there had been a flight to take us home we would have mortgaged everything to have booked it.
Amazingly we did stop smoking and with the hindsight of 12 years can now look back and laugh about our holiday from hell.

HONOURABLE MENTION also goes to Stacie Pughe for her tale of two young girls' missed flight and leering Greek workmen on the ferry and to Val Bunker who spent a disastrous night with cockroaches for company and huge holes in the sheets. 

My warm thanks to Jo Bartlett, author of Among a Thousand Stars who organised the competition.

My novels AFTER THE STORM and THE LIE OF YOU are published by Head of Zeus books.