Also, my left foot and to a lesser extent, my left hand feel a bit lost, what are they supposed to do?
These were all questions I asked myself when climbing into my shiny new rental car. I hadn’t specified a transmission type, so I guess that gives you an automatic as standard. I was genuinely a bit flummoxed as to how to move the lever at first (as it turned out, I had to hold in the foot brake to move it). The L is a low gear for steep hills and towing and the left limbs just needed to relax and let their opposite number do all the work for once, except for you, you should be up here too, 10 and 2 my friend.
A bonus mid-year trip for us, we tried and failed to get Glastonbury tickets and found ourselves with a surplus of holiday days. After a bit of shopping around we found a couple of cheap flights to Dublin, which was perfect by virtue of being so close.
Just while I mention the flights, I thought I should mention Ryanair, who unsurprisingly due to it being Ireland, had the cheapest flights, so were who we had booked with.
A few years ago, it became law that all passengers had to be allocated seats when they checked in for their flight (prior to this, on budget airlines it was a bit of a free-for-all and in some cases a mad scramble to get in the queue by people trying to make sure they sat together). All in all, the change is quite positive as you have the safety reasons I presume they did it for (to balance the plane) and that mad scramble to get in a queue has gone as everyone already has a seat.
Because of this change, most airlines now have an early check-in option where you can pay a bit more to pick your seat if you want to guarantee you sit together or you can wait for the free check-in and your seats will be randomly allocated, but they cannot guarantee they will be together if the plane is already pretty full. That’s how it works with most airlines nowadays, Ryanair has a slightly different policy to everyone else, in that if you don’t pay to pick your seats, you definitely will be separated, it’s not that they don’t have any seats together, because after the allocate the seats a planes length apart, they once again offer to let you buy the neighbouring seat. So Ryanair have actually put a price on sitting together. That price is only a few pounds, but after the underhanded tactics, that becomes a few pounds too many (also, for a 40 minute flight, I think I can handle being by myself). I wasn’t the only one, no-one near me seemed to know their neighbours either (and there are stories of parties of 15 being separated across an aircraft: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/travel/2017/06/ryanair-sits-hen-party-in-fifteen-separate-rows-as-outrage-over-seating-policy-grows-)
It shouldn’t really be surprising, Ryanair were the masters of the hidden fee before they were banned and I have heard of them wanting to introduce a toilet charge and an extra charge for heavy people. I just wonder if this policy differs at all with families and if their booking processes would ever leave by themselves too? Possibly it is different, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
So, Ireland and that rental car, we went with the rental car just due to the price of accommodation in Dublin, at the cheapest end of the scale was about £200 a night, but about ½ an hours drive north is Laytown where we found a great little B&B called Tara House for less than ½ that (which we actually forgot to pay due to arriving really late and leaving really early – You will be glad to know we have since settled that debt, it would be a little strange to be sharing the story if we hadn’t), also, in Ireland they drive on the right (by which I mean the left) side of the road, so I knew I could drive there without confusion. OK, I admit, there is nothing inherently wrong with driving on the right, lots of people do it and probably find us really strange, but the left (by which I mean… wait, no I was already using the direction then, carry on) is the right side for me.
