why i'm afraid of ryanair

if you are able to read this, then all has gone as scheduled... so far...

friday evening i am meant to take ryanair from berlin to london for my dear friend, elaine's, golden birthday party. i am slightly nervous because ryanair and myself have had a rocky relationship. apologies in advance for the length of this...

back when i lived in france, my friend trish and i were traveling over christmas (rather than going back to the US). this was my first and last "backpacking" experience, but that is a story for another time. we planned to leave paris on a friday evening and fly to dublin to spend the weekend with our irish friends from school. on monday morning, we were going to fly to brussels and start our train "backpacking" journey.

in paris, ryanair flies out of an airport called beauvais which is pretty much in the middle of nowhwere. it is not accessible by public transportation and, appropriately enough, you have to go to an irish pub on the outskirts of paris to catch the bus (which you have to pay for, of course) to take you to the airport. only ryanair (and MAYBE one other small airline) flies out of beauvais. the bus has to take about 100 roundabouts and you can have fun practicing your french numbers by counting the cows. that's how far away the airport is.

anyway, trish and i get to the airport with everyone else at the same time (they were all on the bus, its' the only way to get to the airport unless you rent a car). we check in, wait for the plane (which is delayed) and then go through customs and wait in the very small waiting area with no chairs for the plane to arrive. the plane does not arrive. as soon as they announce that the flight is cancelled, trish and i are in action mode. being seasoned travelers, we split up - she collects our bags from the luggage rack and i go stand in line to talk to the agents about the next flight. i am second in line. she then joins me and the rest of the passengers line up behind us.

being 5 or 6 days before christmas, the flight was full and the line was long. for some, stupid, illogical, unprofessional, annoying, stupid reason, before helping anyone, the agents go through the line and pull all of the families out and move them to be in front of us in line. i have major issues with nepostism and don't love kids. doing this did not make me happy. we wait in line for over an hour to finally get to teh front when we were told that we were now on the flight to dublin for monday afternoon. we pointed out that we had a flight on the SAME AIRLINE from dublin to brussels monday MORNING. the agents didn't care.

trish had to call her father in the US who called the irish ryanair office and bitched to them for over a half hour before they finally gave us our money back for both flights. great! we had our money back. not great! we were stuck at beauvais. since we had been so far back in line, and needed to wait for trish's dad to deal with the higher-ups, we missed the bus back to paris. we luckily got another ride and ended up at charles de gaulle etoile on a friday evening less than a week before christmas. we go to the SNCF office (french train system) and due to our planned hostel stays for the / next 2 weeks, were limited in where we could go. we decided to go to brussels early and stay in a hotel until we could check into our hostel on monday. we got to brussels around midnight and our hotel was right across the street from the train station. it was not until the next morning when we looked outside that we realized we were in the ghetto. brussels is now my least favorite city i have ever been to and i partly blame it on ryanair.

so... the point of all this? i'm afraid of and afriad for my flight for this weekend. if fri night's is cancelled, then i might not get to london in time for elaine's party on sat or - gasp! - i might not make it alll. if this posts, it means that i made it. if there is no post after this, it means that i made it there, but not back...