Dear Ryanair, I don't think we can be friends.

I had thought our journey to Edinburgh was long with all the overnight travel but it was really nothing compared to our Journey home. I woke up in our hostel tired and feeling a bit sad about going home. We'd had a great weekend and seen loads of a beautiful city, had a great time with my friends and Stephen may have drank all of the wine. I think I wanted to stay and do more and see more of the city because Waterford feels like it has very little to offer when you compare it. We checked out of the hostel in record time and I was feeling wrecked but hungry so we got breakfast at a local bar and then took one last walk into the city so I could pick up some last minute presents. By 11 we were lugging our bags up the hill and heading for the airport bus. 

We had one last drive through the city and laughed when we realized how far the zoo actually was from the city. Perhaps had we been less sleep deprived on the day we would never have attempted it. We got the airport in plenty of time for check in and that's when it all went downhill. In Edinburgh airport they have self scanning machines for checking in your baggage and the one I was using was telling me I was over my allowance even though it was under 15kg so I called someone over for help and she explained that I hadn't actually booked a bag for my return flight and the €25 was for the bag to come one way. I was pretty mad at this point because that's a stupid policy which wasn't in place last time I'd flown and also who the hell flies somewhere with a bag and doesn't fly home with it. I think you can safely assume the majority of people travelling with checked in luggage plan on bringing it home with them. So anyway at this point I was thinking I was going to have to pay an extra €25 and I wasn't impressed especially since my bank account was almost completely tapped out by the Edinburgh trip. After a bit of head scratching and me stubbornly refusing to ask some one for help, because I was tired and pissed off with Ryanair, Stephen stopped someone and asked where we could pay for my bag and we were sent to a machine nearby. I put in all my details and then it came up that for 15kg bag going back I would be expected to pay £50 which works out roughly at €62 and I was a bit shocked wondering what the hell I was supposed to do so we logged into a computer and looked up the email Ryan air had sent me and then looked up their faq on baggage which wasn't particularly helpful and nowhere did they explicitly say you have to pay for your bag twice but the entries on public forums seemed to be filled with people who had been stung just like me so I returned to the machine to pay for my bag to come home while fighting (tired and angry) tears.

I was in pretty lousy form while we went through security and also fairly hungry until I realized how much they were charging for everything (yes, I had forgotten what racket airports are) and then decided  I wasn't that hungry after all. I was still trying to work out how I might pay that €62 back into my bill money. Hungry and cranky we made our way to our boarding gate and I was just wishing I could be home already but it seems Ryanair had other plans for us and our flight was delayed by 40 minutes which did nothing to improve my mood. Then we must have been sitting on the plane for a full 15 minutes after everyone got settled before we even took off. I slept for most of the flight and then arrived in Dublin groggy and hungry only to walk miles of corridors to baggage reclaim and then have to wait another 15 minutes or more before any bags began to appear. At this stage it was almost 5 and we wanted to catch an airport bus back home at 5.30 plus neither of us had really eaten anything since breakfast so it was a bit of a rush once we got through customs. I bought all of the snacks in spar (crisps, nuts and flavoured rice cakes) to keep me going and we got to the bus in plenty of time to get a decent seat and make ourselves comfortable. An hour and a half later we were only on the outskirts of Dublin city and I promptly abandoned all hopes of making it home by 8pm as I watched the bus driver take the longest possible route back home. It was 9pm by the time we got to our bus stop and by this stage we were both wrecked and very very hungry. Half an hour later and we had the suitcases dumped in my room and we were in my car enroute to Tescos as my apartment had been cleared of food before I left and then it was nearly ten by the time I got food cooking. 

I think we might have both inhaled our dinners without actually tasting them before collapsing on my bed to sleepily half watch a tv show. Today I am still going around in a sleepy haze, trying to muster the willpower and energy to head to Clonmel for a crossfit class and I'm still bristling a little over my Ryanair debacle.