Adventures with RyanAir
When I was traveling in the UK recently, I decided to visit my boyfriend’s sister and her husband, both of whom live in Nuremberg, Germany, a city not too far from Frankfurt. As an Australian, I’m used to traveling ridiculous distances to get anywhere at all—even to get out of the country can take several hours, and a flight to the UK takes close to a day. So, having checked out the distance to Germany, I was pretty impressed to see that I could fly there in 90 minutes. And, I was even more impressed when I started browsing through the various discount airlines that service the UK. RyanAir had some amazingly cheap flights, so I decided to go with them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d got myself into. First, I had to take a bus from Oxford to Stansted airport, which is a fairly substantial trip in and of itself. Given that my flight left at something like 5am, I stayed overnight at the airport. Ah, comfortable sleeping. When my flight finally started boarding, I realized that there were no allocated seats—which I suppose is why everyone had been pushing and shoving in front of each other. To make matters worse, my flight didn’t actually arrive in Frankfurt. It went somewhere called Frankfurt Hahn, which is apparently a decommissioned military base that’s several hours away from Frankfurt. Oops. My poor boyfriend’s sister and her husband had to get up at a ridiculous hour in order to get to this airport, and I felt horribly guilty. I’d also booked a flight out of Germany to Venice, but when I realized that this would mean that I’d somehow have to get back to Frankfurt Hahn, I cancelled my flight. Well, cancelled’s not the right word, since RyanAir doesn’t allow cancellations or refunds. Rather, I gave RyanAir some more of my money, and paid for a train fare as well. All in all, I’m not sure I’d bother again! More amazing update everyone, Bevealy just got a job with a company that sells the infamous Fannie Pack, how great is that job for a traveller, I expect freebies!