Tenerife: Snakes on a Plane

We don’t have a good relationship with Ryanair (who does??). The break-up ocurred many years back when things went wrong on a trip and Ryanair, of course, took advantage of the opportunity to totally fleece us. It was the final straw, and we swore off using them unless there was absolutely no alternative.  We’ve happily gone our separate ways for over 10 years since then. Unfortunately when booking our first holiday “with child” through a third party, we didn’t realise exactly which low cost carrier was involved. “Sure it’ll be grand – Ryanair don’t fly there”, said my husband confidently. A few clicks later, and up popped our booked Ryanair flights. Dammit! Flying with an infant just got harder.

So it was back to standing in a long queue of irritable passengers waiting for the stampede onboard to obtain seats. Yes, we’re too stingy to pay an exorbitant price for the pleasure of having pre-assigned seats on a sardine tin. Not that Ryanair didn’t try and sneak in that plus extra costs as we went through the online checkin process (Really – a €28 ‘admin fee’ plus €28 ‘online checkin fee’, and we don’t even get seats until we board and fight for them?!).

Typically the Rascal was coming down with the worst cold he’s ever had. I was valiantly fighting off the same. Brodie resisted for a couple of days, and then came down with the plague too. Dread is the only way to describe the thought of taking our first flight with the little man, and now he was sick to boot. Luckily we got our cranky bundle onboard early enough to get ourselves two seats. Now to distract an increasingly hungry and tired baby until takeoff.

The difficult part was trying to estimate how long until we actually took off so the feed wouldn’t be over too quickly. Happily a feed on takeoff knocked him out for a couple of hours.  Apart from a dead leg from the weight of him, it was relatively painless. The biggest problem was the constant barrage of noise. Ryanair staff hard at work, hawking their wares over a very loud loudspeaker. They startled the Rascal half-awake each time they thought of some other uninteresting thing to say. The last time we were accosted in a similar manner was on the streets of Morocco, and at least we could escape back to a hotel to avoid that. The constant peddling of unwanted items and the hideous yellow decor combined to produce a throbbing headache. At least there was only about an hour of entertaining a bouncing baby before we were due to land with another feed, and of course the cringe worthy trumpet fanfare. Have they no shame at all? Still, a successful first flight overall – the surrounding passengers even commented on how good the Rascal had been.