SHE must be the unluckiest traveller ever, but Barbara Nelson is putting her nightmare experiences to profitable use - by writing a book about them.

Most of us have a story or two to tell about horror hotels and airport delays, but newly retired Barbara, from Haughton Green, Denton, reckons she can put the tin lid on all of them.

For she says she and her husband have fallen victim to holidays from hell for more than 30 years - and there are no signs of any improvement. Her memoirs, Elephants in the Mist, will detail many of the catastrophic trips they have taken to all parts of the world, including being hit by storms and floods, and being robbed on a sunshine beach.

The title came to her when they were on holiday at the famous Treetops lodge in Kenya, where they were expecting to see wildlife on the prowl in the middle of the night.

They had arranged for an alarm call to wake them, but Barbara said: "All I could see was mist - and it's never misty up there.

Unusual

"It's so unusual, but it just so happened that the night we were there we couldn't see anything."

She said: "The book is just an idea for a bit of fun really. But whenever we go on holiday we just wonder what will go wrong, because something always does.

"It goes back many years. We were stuck in floods in Yugoslavia, and we got evacuated from our hotel in Florida because of a hurricane."

It didn't get any better when they tried Spain. She said: "We were robbed on a beach; our passports, money, tickets - everything."

Tragedy struck when the couple jetted off for an exotic holiday in the Gambia. Barbara said: "My mother died while we were away, and trying to get home from there was terrible."

On another occasion they were booked on a flight to Cuba, but instead spent an uncomfortable weekend at Gatwick Airport having been bumped off the flight because it was overbooked. Their most recent dilemma was on a trip to Vienna when their suitcases failed to arrive.

A report by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office reveals that holiday problems are not uncommon.

In a 12-month period to March, 1,368 Britons were arrested in the USA, 955 were hospitalised in Greece, 376 died in France, and a massive 6,078 lost their passports in Spain.

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