Living in London

We have a peaceful retreat planned on the west coast of Ireland for the Easter weekend.

It turns out that the Easter holiday is a big deal in Europe. In the U.K. both Good Friday and Easter Monday are “bank holidays” which means everyone has a four day weekend and many people travel. We decided to try to beat the crowd for our trip to Ireland and leave on Thursday. Good grief. It’s been many years since we have been on a non-business airline (Aer Lingus), flying on a non-business day (roughly equivalent to the day before Thanksgiving in the U.S.).

Tempers flared, carry-on bags had to be removed to the hold, and both boarding and disembarking took forever. Of approximately 150 seats, there were no less than 30 adults holding infants, and every one of them were squalling. Basically every seat was filled—and some were filled with two people. Aer Lingus even has a special seatbelt for use when a child is on your lap—it hooks around the kid and to your seatbelt. The munchkin belt was something we had never seen before in our hundreds of thousands of airline miles. Perhaps this is a cue that Aer Lingus may be, um, a bit too Catholic-family oriented for our future travel needs. There’s a Monty Python skit in here somewhere, but we were so desperate to disembark in Cork, we left it on the plane!