YORK'S RAILWAY MUSEUM

A piece of advice for anyone with kids within a couple of hours of York: take them to the free National Railway Museum there - it is just amazing - Léon ran around for hours from train to train just thrilled to see them all! It's definitely a good, cheap day out!

WHO TO VOTE FOR ON MAY 6

I am a seasoned traveller. I have backpacked round Europe and even NYC alone and with kids and babies for the best part of 25 years so I don't normally find getting from A to B difficult. This time however crossing the 1400km from Copenhagen to Calais via Aarhus with over a million other stranded air passengers was proving tricky and costly. I didn't for one minute believe my MP (East Renfrewshire's Jim Murphy - Secretary of State for Scotland) could offer me anything I hadn't come up with myself but I wanted him to be aware there were people stranded in Europe for whom a bus in Madrid was not the optimum solution. More for fun, and for want of something better to do given the vacuum of information we were facing in Northern Europe, I decided to tease him with the following email first thing on Monday morning:

Hello Jim
I am one of your constituents living in Newton Mearns. This morning I had to ring all three of my children's schools to explain I, my husband and my 5 children are currently stranded in Europe unable to return home because of the Volcano. I was told many children and teachers are in the same situation.I find it interesting that no one is coming up with any solutions to get us home. Flying is a cheap form of transport these days - being able to fly to Europe doesn't mean you have enough money to finance endless nights in unbooked hotels, meals in restaurants or buses, trains and ferries across Europe. I simply cannot afford to come home by means other than budget airlines.

Today I was utterly dismayed to hear Gordon Brown on BBC world coming up with a plan to repatriate people in the US via Spain not even mentioning people stranded in Europe itself. I was due to fly from Copenhagen last Friday morning. I have tried overland and managed to get as far as Hamburg where the trains are now so full I cannot proceed given I have 2 babies with me. I am being offered 5 hour waits between train connections in the middle of the night in the middle of Germany and they are estimating 2 days overland to Calais where I might get a boat and then try to find my way from Dover to Glasgow. Three days overland at huge expense, with 5 kids between 12 weeks and 12 years is unaffordable.

Apart from Mr Brown no politician seems even to have noticed the crisis. I will be deciding who to vote for on May 6, depending on who has some real and practical solutions for me and the many families stranded at the end of the Easter school holiday.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions.


Of course I heard nothing back for 48 hours, which had I not had my mother-in-law's flat keys would have cost me another £300 at Danish prices if I had needed to pay two days food and two nights in a hotel at the current exchange rate. So 2/10 for a speedy reply for starters.
Then suddenly this afternoon I received this reply from one of his minions - I will copy it for you verbatim:

Thanks for emailing Jim, he has asked me to respond on his behalf.

Several constituents have contacted Jim about the terrible disruption that the volcanic ash has triggered across the world.

As I am sureyou can understand there is little that individual candidates can do, but please rest assured that the prime minister government is taking the matter extremely seriously and doing all it can to get people home as quicly as possible.

The Foreign Office's current plan for the dealing with UK nationals stranded in Europe can be found here - http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/021-Flight-disruption-help/022-travel-in-europe/

I hope that this is of some use to you and reassures you somewhat.

If there is anything further you would like Jim to do please get in touch.

Best regards

Funnily enough I had actually found the foreign office's page of advice several days ago. What I do find interesting is that when I wrote pointing out crossing Europe to Calais or Madrid was too expensive and impractical with small children and the crowds currently on the trains and asked if Jim had any more helpful advice or suggestions, his second in command simply sent me an email full of spelling and grammatical errors linking me to the foreign office page that tells me to make my way either to Calais or Madrid after checking with my airline. Let's have a big round of applause for that one!

So I will sit here till Friday and if my flight is cancelled again, I will make my own expensive way to Calais (£500) and as a thanks for the 'prime minister government' sending all the buses he could find to Madrid rather than various centres around Europe, I will make a point of making sure I do not vote for Mr Murphy and his crew on May 6.

A VOLCANIC RANT

Several points on the stranded passenger issue:

I have heard several flippant remarks on the TV about people getting a prolonged holiday. The thing is when you book out of your hotel on the last day of your holiday, you don't tend to have budgeted for an extra £100 or so a night to stay on somewhere else. Nor have you budgeted for another week's meals in restaurants. You have no more clean clothes, so you go looking for a laundrette and end up doing your very own impersonation of the old jeans ad sitting in your underwear. You may not have necessary medication with you - who takes a month's supply of say the pill or asthma medicine when they go away for 4 or 5 days? You don't know when any of it will end so you are stressed financially.

I read today on the BBC a quote that summed it up. Someone who had flown to Copenhagen like us with a budget airline (we paid £250 roughly to come with Norwegian) was now facing an overland trip back to Scotland choosing between car hire at over £1000, land travel at £700 or as he put it 'haemorrhaging money indefinitely on Copenhagen hotels and restaurants'.

I heard a suggestion that as many people as possible should try carpooling to get home. On the face of it, this sounds like a reasonable idea but stop a minute. Why would people be on holiday at this time of the year? Because the schools are off. If you choose now you are likely to be a couple with at least one child with you, more likely two. Sharing a taxi home or car hire when you have to pay 4/5 of the cost makes carpooling insignificant as an option for most.

We fly everywhere because flying is the only means of travel we can afford. Flying is much cheaper than trains these days. Journalists are acting as if people who could afford to be in Europe can simply pay whatever it costs to come home overland as if paying out an extra £1K or £2K is nothing to your average passenger. We paid, as I said, about £250 for our holiday. We cannot simply fork out an extra £100+ a day to stay on or travel overland. Most people will be in this situation.

People are also acting as if the problem stops when we reach Dover. The UK is unlike the rest of Europe. We fly everywhere because internal trains are three times the price and because of that when we arrive in Dover, getting to Glasgow is another financially significant trip if alternative means of transport are even being laid on. Everyone who is stranded did not come from Kent. Scots are even more likely to have flown because they are further from Europe on land.

We are in the middle of a recession. How many employers will be happy when the workers don't come back for weeks after Easter? How stressful is it for those who can't afford to lose their job to be stuck here haemorrhaging cash they can't pay back indefinitely?

And to cheer us up this morning Gordon Brown has finally noticed the problem (probably when many fewer kids and teachers than expected turned up for their first day of school after the Easter break) - great at last we might get an extra few buses or boats... but no, it seems no one is stranded in Europe, it is simply a problem for people stranded in the US and further afield so he's going to have them flown to Spain and brought home by bus - he hasn't noticed us at all...

I guess the solution in that case is to try to get a boat from here to the US so Gordon will repatriate us eventually via Spain. Grrrrr.

THE VOLCANO FROM HELL

I was half-packed and psyched up to come home on Thursday. We had planned a day of farewells to the relatives in Copenhagen and then a quick flight home on Friday morning. Dad texted me about an Icelandic volcano that was erupting and causing chaos. My first reaction - Is this an April fool's joke? It was too weird to be anything else. I turned on the Danish news and realized it wasn't a joke. News was saying it would last 12 hours so we signed up with Norwegian airlines for text updates on our Friday morning flight and went to the goodbye dinner with Miriam and Bjørn. The news told us before dinner that Danish airspace had been closed as a precaution until 12pm Friday. Our flight was 12-10pm - I was beginning to doubt our chances of escape but maybe we would just be the first flight out of Denmark after the crisis. Sitting on the bus home from dinner at 9pm Norwegian texted us that our flight was officially cancelled. :-(
We watched the news as they prolonged the airspace shut-down hour by hour. We checked Norwegian and they had no more flights before Monday. There was no point in hanging about Denmark as long as that so we opted for a refund and a landtrip. Thomas went out at 8-30am on Friday to find the best land route. At 9am I got a rushed call. He had managed to get train tickets from Copenhagen to Amsterdam via Hamburg - a fourteen hour trip with just six train changes followed by a ferry from Amsterdam to Newcastle leaving 24 hours later, arriving in England on Sunday morning - a 48 hour trip in all. The only problem with it was that it was leaving in 45 minutes so I had to finish packing the two cases, and the rucksack and get myself and both girls across Copenhagen in about 30 minutes. It was a beautiful morning and it was the Danish Queen's 70th birthday into the bargain so there were more people on the streets than usual awaiting the royal parade.
First my in-laws phoned for a taxi but they said it would take more than an hour to find one with baby seats and they wouldn't take us without. They then rang Miriam who said there was too much traffic to guarantee getting to me and then to the station. They started surfing the Danish bus system. I tried to explain I knew how to navigate Copenhagen myself and would take a bus to Nørreport and a train or Metro from there. They kept surfing - how could the foreigner know how to navigate Copenhagen better than them? They aren't from Copenhagen and had been using a car all week but... I made to leave. My mother-in-law decided the best bet was her coming with me to the station while Peter drove the luggage in the (3 seater) car. We got to the station with 15 minutes to spare but there was no sign of Thomas or Peter. I rang Thomas - he yelled 'complications' and hung up. There was still no sign of Peter!
With five minutes till the departure Thomas appeared running and told me to follow him. We both sprinted into Copenhagen's main station 'Travel shop' skipping ten queues of 50 people each all shoving, pushing and screaming in many languages. We weren't the only ones who had worked out there had to be a land route. After all those years of flying everywhere (I haven't interrailed since the early 90s) this actually came as a surprise to me! Oh dear.
So what was the 'complication'? There were two departments - one for train tickets, one for ferries. Thomas had bought the train ticket and reserved the ferry one but by the time he'd been redirected to ferries, some numpty had sold his reserved ticket and we had approximately 2 minutes to decide whether to go to Amsterdam without a ferry ticket or simply abandon the plan.
I figured if we got all the way from Copenhagen to Amsterdam over land then going down the coast trying for ferries in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Zeebrugge, Ostend and Calais wasn't going to be too hard. I'd done it so often alone as a student, it really wasn't rocket science so agreed to go to Amsterdam.
We found Peter beside the train throwing in our luggage while Miriam fought the guard valiantly to stop it leaving without us. We jumped in as it pulled away and then set about trying to find seats given we didn't have reservations.
The first train was fine. We crossed half of Denmark sitting together. We had a 15 minute change half way across, where again we had no problems finding seats. It was quite a fun adventure!

We checked the schedule. Most of the trains had about 15 minutes between them, the one in Hamburg at 6pm had half an hour. That was our only window for finding food. Miriam had thrown in a box of cold rice from the night before and a couple of slices of ryebread so we'd survive the first 8 hours.
Things went fine until the Danish border. On leaving it the train ground to a halt and sat for half an hour with no explanation. Strange... Half an hour into Germany, half an hour before our scheduled changeover in Hamburg the train stopped again and a guard announced only in German that there were major trackworks ahead and that the train was stopping. All passengers were to get out and transfer to buses and we'd be driven into Hamburg. This didn't seem over-problematic, just a pain to move all the luggage. It turned out however that the German railways (DB) had been assuming normal levels of passengers and had laid on a bus, but with many intercity passengers instead of the handful of locals they'd expected on a normal Friday, they suddenly had to scramble up two more buses and drivers and by the time we arrived onboard we had 25 minutes to reach our departing train in Hamburg and the driver was estimating it'd take just over an hour.
On arrival in Hamburg we confirmed our train had already left then joined the 60 people queue in the Travel Centre. The guy in there gave Thomas a new train timetable that necessitated a 4-5 hour wait for a connection in the middle of nowhere at 2am and warned us the station there would close so we'd be out in the cold. We were then redirected to the lady who stamps the tickets to revalidate them.
A very smiley, chubby friendly-looking woman looked up from her desk and we explained where we were going. She peered over her glasses and inquired as to whether we really fancied 4 hours in the cold or if we'd rather DB paid us a hotel room for our 'Minikinder'. Hard choice?
She set her colleague to ringing around warning things were fully booked because of the crisis. I envisaged a scabby, dodgy hotel like you often find around large stations - the kind of place pick pockets hang out but if DB were paying, I'd just sleep on my handbag. We were given a ticket for free Bed and Brekkie in the Hamburg Park Hyatt and set out on foot to look for it.
Much to my surprise I found myself in front of a luxury hotel ten minutes later. At reception we were asked where the girls were to sleep in a double room. We asked if they had something even cot-sized for Anna and told them Amaia could sleep with us for the night. They saw the DB certificate offering to pay unlimited costs 'We'll upgrade you to a suite with two Queen-sized beds, Sir' they informed us, rubbing their hands together as they pocketed (I have since checked on the Internet) €435 of DB money!

The next morning we were met with a feast fit for a king - unlimited everything washed down with oranges pressed for us. Anna was given her own silver cutlery with bears on and after our long trip I could happily have stayed there all day but we'd a train to catch at 9-45 to Osnabrück.
We dashed to the station and manouvered the cases and the buggy down to the platform. We waited and five minutes before departure a sign popped up saying in German that the train would leave from Harburg. What was Harburg??? Once more the trackworks were causing a problem. We'd to take a metro to a suburb and catch a train there but we'd no idea what time it was leaving at and no one else knew either. We hopped on the metro and arrived to find we'd to climb three or maybe four floors with no lift to get to the station from the metro. We had two cases, a rucksack, and two babies in a broken double buggy. One wheel had snapped on the girls' buggy on Thursday but we were trying to coax it to the ferry because carrying a baby and a two year old was more impossible. My back ached from trying to push the broken buggy while Thomas dealt with the cases. My boob ached from my latest bout of mastitis just two days earlier - I'm so run down from being on antibiotics on and off since Amaia was born.
We reached the top of course to find Osnabrück had already left. We joined yet another queue of grumpy travellers with large cases to find out plan C or were we on D by now? I was beginning to notice that the percentage of travellers with airport tags on their oversized luggage had gone from 20% on Friday to 70% on Saturday. More languages were being spoken around me. I recognised they were from further afield. It seemed everyone on mainland Europe had decided to try to go home overland and Germany's trackworks were throwing a spanner in everyone's works. A new plan was produced which meant Amsterdam was another day further back and the ferries and Eurostars were all fully booked beyond Monday. The buggy died at that point and we'd no way to carry the girls. The DB asked if we wanted to go on or if we wanted a free ticket home to Thomas's parents.
At this point my kids rang to say they were stranded in France too. I spoke to my ex-husband and established they couldn't get out overland on a bus without two overnights in Strasbourg and London and couldn't get Eurostar tickets either. The first flight (if it flies) that they could get on was April 23. At the thought of not seeing my big babies for another week, I just lost the strength to carry on and stood in Harburg with the tears rolling down my cheeks.
Given we were going to have to sit it out for days and we couldn't afford hotels, we reluctantly opted to return to Denmark - this time to Århus where we could sit in Thomas's parents' flat as they were driving to Italy.
The Intercity train arrived and we tried to get on - I swear the whole of Hamburg airport had the same idea - there was standing space only till the Danish border. I perched on the suitcase trying to feed Amaia standing up as Anna sobbed in distress 'I'm sooooo sad' over and over for an hour. An old lady (maybe late 70s) got on at the first stop. She asked to push through the people saying she had a reservation. People tried to let her pass, and a guard arrived. She explained the same to him. He shook his head and said there was no hope and told her to stand till some people got out.
Eventually Thomas got enough space to sit on the floor in a compartment.

And after a while I even got a seat. At 6-30pm we arrived back in Århus having spent exactly 32 hours on the road getting nowhere.
We are now stuck here hoping something will fly soon, with tickets for (you'll laugh if you've been reading all my recent ranting) the only flights we could get - yeah you guessed it - Ryanair next Friday.

NORWEGIAN AIRLINES

Norwegian Air Shuttle LN-DYB
Originally uploaded by Drewski2112

After my displeasure with good old Ryanair over the past few days, imagine my delight at finding this little paragraph tucked away in one of their rival's terms and conditions. Norwegian Airlines actually says 'Children under the age of two are allowed to check in up to 5 kilos of luggage free of charge. A car seat and a pram will also be accepted free of charge.' Well blow me over - someone has thought through that crazy airline policy whereby the person who pukes, poos and dribbles on all their clothes, who uses nappies and who isn't allowed luggage and offered the poor stressed parent a token gesture. Wonderful! So I can choose between Ryanair Edinburgh to Billund or Norwegian Edinburgh to Copenhagen... a hard choice!

RYANAIR AGAIN, ON A MORE LIGHTHEARTED NOTE

My dad just emailed me this and I thought my fellow Ryanair-haters may be amused by it.

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary arriving at Dublin Airport and going into the bar for a pint of Guinness.
“That’ll be one Euro please,” said the barman.
A delighted O’Leary handed over his Euro and said: “That’s a great price.”
“Will you be wanting a glass with your Guinness, sir?” enquired the barman.

I think it'd have been better of course if O'Leary had been charged for his bar stool, his beer mat, the washing of his glass afterwards and the right to pay using cash, debit or credit card of course but you can't have everything ;-)

RYANAIR I HATE YOU

I remember fondly when Ryanair started out, back in the days when they actually used their grey matter. They thought through the plastic meals and worked out that many customers would rather fly cheaper and not receive the plastic food. That was about the last time they got a policy right. Now I hate them with a passion. Apparently to 'incentivise all of its passengers to travel light' during the summer months, they are going to charge passengers £20 per case per flight. Now bearing in mind that they don't allow you to pool luggage and per flight means per leg of your trip, then for my family to go to Italy via Stansted (not because we love Stansted but because they don't go directly) we have to pay 7 people times 4 flights times £20 to take our bags with us, because let's face it, whether they want us to fly light or not, not many families with kids can fit enough luggage in the their back pocket for a three week stay in another climate. This gives us a £560 surcharge over and above flight costs. Of course they also still slap on the wonderful charge per person for paying with a debit (no, not just credit) card. This is a charge per person, not a charge per card of course because processing that one payment using one card for one amount is apparently seven times more costly to them :-\ So we have our flights, our surcharges for bags, for paying them, for wanting our kids to travel sitting near us etc etc The original £11.99 flights are now costing us over £1000 and they then put a coin slot on the loos to 'incentivise all of their passengers to go to the toilet before boarding'. Two hundred passengers sharing a single toilet that will get jammed the third time someone puts a quid in the slot and nowhere else to make your kid pee, just great. No matter how well travelled my bladder is, I can hardly tell Anna at just 2 that she has to hold it in for a two or three hour flight. If I was planning to reboard a Ryanair plane, I think I'd take a potty and ask the flight attendant where I was meant to empty it after use! But I fully intend to boycott them till they come to their money-grabbing senses, so it won't be a problem.

HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE REALLY LOST THEIR JOB?

Commuting home from Glasgow city centre
Originally uploaded by zawtowers

According to our darling chancellor in this week's debate, the UK has come out of the recession and things are looking up. Something is striking me as odd however...
I was a commuter on Glasgow's hellish M8 for the best part of 20 years before I started working from home. When I lived in the West End and drove to Bishopbriggs every day the journey was 40 minutes instead of the 25 it took outwith rush hour. When I moved to the south side the no go period on the M77 started at 7-20am and went right through to 9-20am... bumper-to-bumper chaos, 20 miles in 2nd gear. The only respite was school holidays when suddenly many parents took a holiday and you could drive almost freely at least till the M77 merged with the M8. Fridays were often slightly lighter (not sure why) but in general the 25 minute trip to Bishopbriggs at rush hour took the best part of an hour.
Last Friday Amaia had an appointment at Yorkhill hospital. It was at 9-30am. Nightmare... Factoring in 10 minutes for parking, I left early around 8-40am and was in town by 9am without going below 6th gear. Where had rush hour gone? Assuming it was a Friday anomaly, I didn't question too much.
Yesterday Anna had an appointment at Yorkhill hospital at 9-30am. Nightmare... Factoring in 10 minutes for parking, I left early around 8-40am and was in town by 9am without going below 6th gear. Now I was really puzzled. It was Wednesday, it wasn't a school holiday and the weather was miserable. All these factors should have meant I would grind to a halt at Silverburn Tesco but no. Rush hour was simply non-existent.
I have to conclude either that at least 60% of Glaswegians have started working from home, or that they've lost their jobs and are still home under their duvets at rush hour these days. What is the truth?

A WEATHER RANT

I know I'm hormonal at the moment so please make allowances... Why are people so crap at driving in the snow in this country? I guess for the first few days the odd, inexperienced driver might have had an excuse, but three weeks in, I still can't even do the school run without seeing numpties coming out of every other junction revving so fast their wheels are spinning on the ice and their back ends are zooming at your face at some crazy speed. Add to that the 4x4 drivers who assume because they have the right tyres for the job, it is fine for them to sit on your tail leaving only a ten centimetre gap. Gimme strength! It isn't hard - just do everything in slow motion, and at a distance and you'll get there (numpties permitting, of course)!

A380

qantas a380
Originally uploaded by Joits

I know I'm a complete plane nerd, but what could have been cooler than a seat on the first Paris - NY flight on an A380???

ITALIAN CAR HIRE

I'm used to hiring cars all over Europe but it occurred to me when we touched down in Pisa that although I have driven in Italy before it has either been at the wheel of a friend's car or in a French hire car.
So off we went to pick up the Nissan Micra we'd booked online. We passed all the large, well-known hire companies and found our Internet one on the end. We were given our keys and tramped out to see our car. The guy on the desk assured us the car was in perfect condition but asked us to check because he couldn't really be bothered going out in the sun. When we noticed one wing was completely bashed, we took a quick photo of it and rushed back in to show the guy, before we got charged for it. And did the guy care? Not a jot! It seems we've arrived in Italy!

A BUS

An Atheist Bus - Newington Green Road, London
Originally uploaded by carlosfpardo

At last! Even public transport I can relate to! It's time we fought back. What is this man's problem? Public transport has been throwing God at us all my life. Aren't we allowed our opinion too?
Thomas saw one in Glasgow this week. I must keep my mobile charged and get a photo!

FIRST FLIGHT

Now here's something not many kids can say these days. I was on a plane for the first time ever with my parents last week. I find that a bit odd given my own kids have been on probably 50 or more planes each with me already in their short lives. I fly loads, and my parents have taken to flying annually too (though not till after I left home!) When I was a kid we drove in a VW Beetle to Blackpool, or in a Ford Cortina to Devon - we didn't do abroad - that was far too expensive. We did all go abroad together once in my childhood but again that was a 3 day drive to le Lavandou in France. It is funny - I think the longest car trip my kids have ever been on is 4 hours, anywhere further has always been a plane. Marcel goes to high school next year and was asking about potential school trips. I mentioned my friend Hilary's son David (14) was going to the South of France on a canoeing trip (He attends the high school Marcel will go to) - Marcel mentioned that would be an expensive trip what with canoes and planes fares. As it happens it is bloody expensive but they are going by coach, just as I did as a 14 year old when I went to Switzerland as on a geography trip - I mentioned that to Marcel and he looked horrified. How long does that even take? he asked - A couple of days I guess. Can all the forty somethings out there who did this as a child imagine today - being in a coach with fifty fourteen year olds in a coach for 48 hours for the first time in their lives - fun! I'm glad I didn't become a secondary school teacher!

GOING FOR A DRIVE - ANOTHER PRO-EUROPEAN RANT

Another thing that really annoys me is why stubborn, stupid Britain didn't swap to driving on the right hand side of the road like 90% of the places Brits are ever likely to need to drive a hire car 50 years ago when it would still have been feasible. I've been driving here in the UK for 23 years, and first started driving in Europe about 21 years ago when I lived in France. Because of that I find driving in both places exactly the same. It comes naturally. I don't have to remind myself to go round roundabouts the wrong way or the likes. One thing I have noticed though over the years is how off-putting people inexperienced at driving on the other side of the road find it. Many Brits are ill at ease at the thought of driving in Europe, many Europeans refuse point blank to hire a car here. Worse still some hire them and then do accidentally take to going round roundabouts backwards or up the wrong side of the road. And taking our own cars on holiday is at best tedious when you want to overtake, at worst dangerous. Why did we feel it necessary to make things so complicated for ourselves? It isn't that right is better than left, it is simply more sensible when you are joined to an entirely right-driving continent. What a complete pain! I'd still change today if they were considering it!

EDINBURGH

We flew over to Denmark for the weekend using Ryanair's new direct Edinburgh to Billund flight - wow - what a difference a direct flight makes considering the tens of hours spent in Stansted over the past 3 years, not to mention the price of £35 return each! The timing isn't great given the flight opened about 3 weeks before Thomas's parents' retirement and house move but I guess it is handy for all of Jutland, wherever they end up.
It is even handier for a wee family weekend in the original Legoland which is within walking distance of the terminal building at Billund and can entertain anyone between 1 and 15 (and their parents) for 2 days minimum.
We did have one rather strange experience, and that was the airport car park in Edinburgh. It seemed unnecessarily complicated. I have often left my car in both Prestwick and Glasgow. You book online, pay by credit card, turn up, park and go on holiday. When you return, you insert the same credit card in the ticket machine and it lets you exit with your car as it recognizes you have paid. A simple experience.
Edinburgh, however has a seriously bizarre system. You book and pay online, same as Prestwick, same prices, same distance to the terminal building. In Edinburgh however they insist you will be fined if you don't leave your keys. So you turn up, drive in and park, you then have to look for someone to note down your number plate and parking bay, print this information out twice, you get one copy, the other copy goes in a plastic food bag with your keys. Your keys are then tossed into a pink box with literally 300 sets of keys. You are told that when your return flight touches down you must text them a number. When you do this they hunt through their box of keys, find yours, drive your car to the opposite side of the same car park then leaving it unlocked, they come and hand you your keys at the terminal building and offer to drive you the 500 metres to your car. Weird! What is wrong with the good old West coast solution?? What advantages does Edinburgh see to this crazy system? Answers on a postcard please, I'm intrigued!

HOME AGAIN

We seem to be back in Scotland again, despite the weather's best efforts to keep us in Denmark. We woke up to a mini hurricane in Sdr Vissing this morning and tree branches had to be extracted from my hire car's wipers before the return leg of the journey could begin. Apart from a little more turbulence than usual, the trip was fairly event free and on schedule. Having lost our only pack of baby wipes yesterday, Anna obliged by deferring pooing till we reached British soil, thus saving us from having to take out a bank loan to buy a pack at Danish prices. Thanks Anna!
So once the washing is done, I'll be back with photos of the Danish autumn.

PSYCHOLOGY AND WHY RYANAIR DOESN'T GET IT...

I was just thinking about my last posting about all those little niggly unavoidable fees Ryanair add on leaving people irate. They really are quite shortsighted. They gave me a fare of £1 return, added £8 to check in, £16 to take an infant, £8 for the infant to check in, £8 per hold bag and an £8 credit card fee each for me and the baby plus £30ish in taxes. So the total bill £87 for 2 returns to Denmark. By the time I had ticked every possible box and failed to save all these £8 fees I was seething. But I am of the pre-Ryanair generation. I remember the old days when flying to Frankfurt BA cost £500 per person and you had to go via Heathrow. If I had simply logged onto Ryanair's page, keyed in I wanted 2 tickets to Denmark and it gave me a final price of £87, I'd feel that was more than reasonable and would probably recommend them to all my friends. Moreover, if I could then tick boxes saying I didn't want to bring a bag for example or I didn't want to check in in the airport and I then saw bill drop by £8 a time, I'd be jumping with joy. I'd love them. I really don't think the people behind Ryanair understand human psychology very well. By showing a tiny price initially then inflating it at every line you annoy people even if the final bill is completely reasonable.
Silly buggers.
ps I'll shut up about Ryanair now, I think I've exhausted the topic for the moment! (Sigh of relief)

RYANAIR REVISITED

Have I ever mentioned I hate Ryanair??? The actual flight and service on board leave me indifferent in general but just booking tickets with them leaves me incensed every time. As you know we had our flights cancelled earlier in the week so have had to go back on their website to rebook. I guess some perverse little nerd has been paid to go through their booking site and flag up every possible point where they can screw you for extra money. The first thing that made me rage was their infant policy. If your child is under two, they are an infant. Here's how it works on a normal old fashioned airline, eg Continental. You can buy an infant ticket at approximately 10% of an adult ticket and sit them on your lap, or, if you are feeling flush, you can buy them a child's ticket at 70% of an adult one and they can sit on their own seat except when the fasten seat belt sign is on at which time they are strapped to your lap. Obviously, not being rich, I usually opt for the first option. On Ryanair you can buy an infant ticket or nothing. So where's the problem? When Ryanair runs its special deals - £1 ticket, free tickets where you pay only taxes etc you aren't allowed to opt for a full price ticket for your infant and your infant doesn't qualify for their special offers, so I have just got into the ludicrous situation where the 4 adults are paying £4 return for seats to Denmark in November, but the infant, who has no seat is paying £16 each way. Why am I not allowed to buy Anna a £1 seat??? Next little annoyance is online check in. Ryanair has decided to charge everyone £8 per person to check in in the airport - funny I thought that was the whole point of the airport. So I opt for online check in to save £8 per person. A box pops up telling me I must use airport check in because I am travelling with an infant even if the infant has no baggage (they aren't allowed any baggage despite paying a ticket 16 times more expensive than the adult accompanying them who is allowed 10kg hand luggage and 15kg in the hold). Discrimination against babies!!!! So I agree to pay their petty little £8 to unnecessarily check Anna in in the airport, meaning I have to go to Edinburgh an hour earlier and they then give me a little pop up box telling me Anna can't check in alone as she is an infant, the adult who is carrying her also needs to check in in the airport at an obligatory cost of £8 despite having no check in bags (which of course had I been taking I'd need to tell them about in advance and pay to check each one into the hold). They are a penny pinching shower of robbers. Finally I ask to pay - they want to add another £8 to my bill, 5 times £8 to be precise. I check the small print - this is a credit card handling fee, not per credit card, not per transaction but per passenger - now they are really taking the piss - the bill is £130 once I add on taxes and they want me to pay an extra £40 credit card handling... Fine I annul the whole thing and delve into my handbag for my debit card instead - yip you guessed it - they then add on £40 debit card handling charge. I try everything - my visa, my mastercard, my American Express and my debit - they all cost the same - there is no way not to incur the £40 charge (unless I maybe try bartering - sending them some sheep perhaps), so how can they justify it as a separate charge??? Ryanair, I hate you!!!!!!!

RYANAIR

Ryanair Boeing 737-800 EI-DCE
Originally uploaded by ironmanixs

In October we were planning to go over to see Thomas's parents. This trip was to kill several birds with the one stone.

• Thomas was going to say goodbye to the house he grew up in as his parents are moving out at the end of the year.
• My parents were coming with us to see where Thomas grew up before his parents moved out.
• Brita and Peter were going to get to see their granddaughter rather than having to wait until Christmas.

Unfortunately thanks to Boeing we will now have to come up with a plan B, or abandon the idea altogether.

For once it doesn't seem to be Ryanair's fault though.

EASYJET OR RYANAIR?

With family abroad, I travel more often than average.

The last few times I have gone to London, or gone elsewhere via London, I have chosen to fly Easyjet rather than Ryanair for that leg of the journey, usually then linking up to a Ryanair flight to the continent.

There are several things I prefer about Easyjet in comparison with Ryanair:

• Easyjet leaves from nearby Glasgow, not distant Prestwick
• Easyjet's ticket price is the ticket price - they don't make you add on £8 a bag , £5 per carseat, and all that cryptic nonsense Ryanair likes to add on to annoy you
• Easyjet doesn't make you tell them in advance (months in advance) how many bags you want to bring on board
• Easyjet doesn't make you weigh or measure the volume of your hand luggage - if it fits, it fits - they don't care
• with Easyjet you can have priority boarding just because you have an infant without having to pay extra, so there is no half hour queue to get on the plane and no worry you can't get a seat beside your 2 year old child
• Easyjet's staff tend to be courteous native English speakers - older than your average Ryanair Eastern European teenager who has learned the announcements off by heart but who looks blank when you put an unexpected question. Their staff aren't on a power trip and they don't give you attitude
• Ryanair plays you an ear-shatteringly annoying fanfare every time a flight lands at destination on time
• Easyjet uses bright shiny new Airbuses which I personally prefer to Boeing 737s

However, it is with regret that I have resolved in future only to fly Ryanair down to London. Strange decision, you might think, but no. The one advantage Ryanair has over Easyjet on the London route in particular, but on all routes as far as I can see after using them literally hundreds of times is punctuality. I would say 95% of the Ryanair flights I have taken over the years have been on time. Recently none of the Easyjet ones have. We were delayed several hours to and from Denmark costing us £350 in lost flights in the summer. Some work colleagues flew Easyjet to Glasgow last week, again arriving and departing 2-3 hours late. With point to point airlines you can unfortunately put up with any crap except delay because delay means missing connecting flights.