A spectacular sunrise greeted us when we finally got back And below, a cool video showing flight paths, or lack of them, over Europe for the third week in April. When London and Amsterdam get going, the whole map goes crazy.. Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo via mefi

Mostly for reasons of leg-room, I hate flying. So I'm disgusted, but not exactly surprised to see Qantas are taking their new, relatively roomy A380 planes and stuffing them with 100 extra economy seats. At least we're going back to Dublin in April with a different airline, one that won't stop twice along the way and hopefully with a little more room.

Man alive that was a long flight... Due to fly out from Sydney at 6.45pm, I was naively confident of actually falling asleep on the plane. That idea was trashed when I saw on the airport tv screens that my flight would be making an extra - scheduled - stop, even though nothing was said on my reservation or ticket. Now I'd have to get off the plane in the middle of the night and there would be no chance of sleep. I tried to complain about this to the security people while I was being swabbed for explosives, but they said it happens quite often and people landing in Sydney always complain to them first. Great. For the next 16 hours I was squeezed in at the window next to an Indian couple who annoyingly fell asleep as soon as we took off and whom I had to wake anytime I wanted to stand up. 9 Hours into the flight we landed in Bangkok, but instead of getting out we had to stay onboard while a whole load of Thai cleaners got on through the rear door and started vacuuming around our feet and cleaning up the rubbish - there was soo much rubbish. We landed in Dubai 6 hours later; 6am outside the window and 40 degrees. Took off an hour and a half later on a fancy new A380 double-decker, but its kind of hard to notice its anything special when you can't see the stairs upstairs. Still, Emirates airlines has nice big tv screens with a bazillion movies to watch. I watched the first 10 minutes of a load of them and tried to sleep. Landed in Heathrow 7 hours later, not sure of the time or whether I should be eating breakfast or dinner. Had a panini and a crap coffee in a Nero's cafe - I think they must quarantine panini in Sydney Border Security for some reason as it was the first one I'd seen in a year and a half. A few hours later I was on a plane again, this time to Dublin, half empty because of the recession and the football on tv.. landed in Ireland only 30 hours after I took off. I am not stepping back on a plane again without pills! Now that that's off my chest, its nice to be back :)

Finally going back to Dublin for a couple of weeks tonight. Its been over a year and, apart from anything else, I'm curious to see just how much the place has changed given the crash. I'm not curious to find out just how sore the 16 hours + 7 hours flights will be. I checked in yesterday online, immediately after I was notified that it was open, and already all the exit row seats had been chosen! How does that happen? Memories of a bad Qantas flight coming out here have me crossing my fingers for a good seat tonight.