This weekend our cat Barney went for a little trip. It was only his second journey altogether in his whole life, and the first time he would have been away from home since we got him.

Together with my Partner we combined two in one and along a mother’s day visit to his parents we did a trial to find out how well would the cat deals with staying at their place. The reason being our week long upcoming Easter holiday.

It might sound simple, and not a big deal, but the whole thing involves first driving in a car for over half an hour followed by staying at a place that has other cats. Imagine that, meeting strange new animals! Barney definitely was not expecting it…

To begin with we needed to strap our ginger boy in his harness. Putting it on went quite well, however the cat seemed quite surprised afterwards. Funny enough rather than roll around frantically on the floor as my other cat did the first few times he had a harness on, Barney took a few steps and then performed a graceful fall down on his back, followed by a slow motion roll to one side. It was especially amusing considering he is usually quite frisky and runs around. It looked like he has been almost paralysed or thinking that if he does not move long enough the “weird thing” on his back will just fall off.

As a pure bred Maine Coon Barney has not been out much, apart from two visits to a park and vet check-ups. When taken outside the house he usually very quickly backs to the front door - well at least he knows where he lives… Also the only other time he has been in a car was when the breeder has brought him to us.

The journey has gone surprisingly well, even despite the cat punching holes in my legs and arms with his claws. Just a few meows, and a lot of heavy breathing later we arrived at our destination. Now came the challenging part.

My partner’s parents have a resident cat called Cleo, as well as another cat called Burglar that comes (quite often) to visit from the neighbours. The big worry was how the bunch would all get along, especially as Cleo seems to be the kind who is easily bullied around by other cats. This would mean being locked up at home with our Barney might be a very stressful experience, particularly considering he is almost twice her size, despite being only just a bit over a year old.

Fortunately all went well, our gentle giant got a little scared, tiny Cleo growled a lot and the cat from next door just ran off. We even got some extra love from the kitty at night as he spent it all at the bottom of our bed, which is friendlier than he usually is.

The journey back on Sunday was surprising peaceful. It even made us wonder weather Barney knew he was going home (and looking forward to it), or just driving in a car during the day is less scary…

I don’t fly often, but on the rare occasions that I do unfortunatelly my airline choice is very limited. My quite common route is London (UK) - Poznań (Poland) and to my despair the choice in basically between Wizzair and Ryanair. There used to be a British Airways direct connection, though it seems it isn’t available anymore, and admittedly it was more pricey than the first two.

There are two reasons for this topic today. Firstly Easter is coming so I had to book my flights recently to not end up with some ridiculous rates. Secondly I found an interesting article on the Guardian’s website about one of the two cheap lines. If it wasn’t so outrageous, it might have actually been funny… here is a quote:

“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”

This was the official response from Ryanair after a small affair has been started online by the airline’s employee’s inappropriate blog pots comments. Admittedly Ryanair as well as its owner are know to be less than polite on many occasions, and not really fussed about customer service, often using their “strive to have the lowest fares” as a facade for rudeness and lack of comforts and amenities.

Since the whole luggage fees thing started I usually opted for Wizzair over Ryanair even if it meant spending a few more pounds. Because at the end of the day I got a higher baggage limit and their “extra fees” on top of the ticket price have been more reasonable. However as we have found out last Christmas there is one flaw on the route I take - the return flights all depart at 6am…

This means leaving my parents house at 3am, which maybe wouldn’t be such a big thing for my partner and I, if it wasn’t for the fact that this is only possible if my parents drive us there… In the end it means everyone gets no sleep.

So in order to make the journey slightly more reasonable this time we went with Ryanair. And it quickly reminded me why I was choosing Wizzair before. Just to start with the hideous booking process which seems to do everything to discourage you from choosing an optimum date and time. With all the hyped claims of doing everything to lower the prices and cut costs “for the customer” the booking does quite the opposite.

You need quite some willpower and determination to click through the dates one by one to compare prices. In our case we take holiday according to our flights, so we have some flexibility when it comes to what day we will be departing. And very often a day sooner or later can mean significant savings. I always liked Wizzair’s weekly preview, it definitely helps you judge prices easily, no need to memorise all your possible departure and arrival combinations just to make a choice. Not to mention that if you click next or previous day to many times in a row the website will just happily throw an error at you, that most of the time means starting the whole booking process all over again.

However in the end this time with a difference in prices and convenient flight times, I crawled through the booking process on Ryanair’s website. Just to be shocked by the luggage prices! Both cheap lines had these extra costs before, but it was just a couple of quid. This time Ryanair was asking  £14 per bag per passenger. Well, with this surcharge, the tickets would no longer be that cheap especially considering there’s also a Visa charge…

In the end we decided to fly with just hand luggage, however ever since I have been wondering about loads of things, whether we can take them in the bag or not. I might actually need to send Easter presents in the post - not a big deal considering the package cost will be less than the baggage charge…

I didn’t like Ryanair before reading the article, but I think that little bit of unnecessary rudeness is too much for me. Looks like we will be joining the “say no to Ryanair” bunch after our farewell flight during Easter.