June 26

June 26, Monday - Ryanair

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Our luxury experience ended upon arrival in Uzbekistan, more commonly know as Stansted Airport, one of London’s regional airports.

Locating the proper ticket counter for Ryanair proved difficult. In order to find your counter, you had to look up your flight on a monitor to see which numbered counter you must use. They really mean it. We saw 93 on the board, but stopped at the first Ryanair we saw, stood in line for a while, until we found this Ryanair position was only for a flight to Denmark!

This system had more than one drawback as we were soon to find out. At counters worldwide, you can take care of anything that comes up at that position. Not with Ryanair. When we showed the agent our Internet booking printout, we discovered an error. Both Ellen and my reservation were in Ellen’s name. Off we went to a central Ryanair ticket counter and waited in line to correct. Then, back to the original position, the agent found our luggage to be overweight. Back we went again to the ticket counter to stand in line with all the “over limit” travelers. Both of these things were costly as well. To change the name of a booking cost 45 pounds. The ticket itself was only 30 pounds. We were well over the 20 kilos weight limit and we suspect Ryanair imposed an excuse to generate additional revenue. We were out another 40 pounds.

This experience gets worse dear reader. To save paying even more overweight charges, we decided to carry on a small piece of luggage bearing gifts for the relatives we would visit later in England. One gift was a nice wooden case with a putter in four parts and a couple of golf balls. In security, we were told this item was verboten. No sporting goods can be carried on. We went back to Ryanair to check it as luggage, but the flight was closed and we had to take it back to security. With just fifteen minutes before the plane was to depart and, again, security rejecting the golf set, we had no viable choice other than to leave it behind where the inspection officer said it would be “melted down” with the other confiscated items.

We boarded the plane after jogging to the farthest reaches of Stansted and finally were on our way to Ireland.