I'm a sucker for timelapse videos and this is another cool one; this time of that troublesome, hard to pronounce volcano. A few bits seem to linger on regular shots of a cold looking landscape, but seeing the ash and steam billow out of the vent is class and the Sigur Ros track is appropriate via mefi

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

Seems we might just catch our flight tomorrow. Planes are now taking off and landing regularly and today's version of our flight took off (8 hours late though). And Etihad were nice enough to publish a full page ad in the newspaper apologising for the situation..

This is pretty bizarre now. Almost all flights out of Europe have been cancelled. And as each day passes, the next days flights get cancelled. We only just managed to get through to our airline yesterday. We'd already re-booked (i.e. bought new) tickets twice. First to Saturday night, and when that was cancelled I followed the airline's website instructions to book again; the earliest we could get was next Thursday! With frustration growing and no word from the airline on how we were going to get refunds for our cancelled flights we went out to the airport yesterday just to try and talk to someone. The airport was mostly deserted, bar a long snaking line around ticket desks for Aer Lingus and Ryanair. The food court upstairs was deserted except for stranded passengers asleep on couches and overpriced sandwiches and snacks going bad on the shelves. When we found the desk for our airline the guy we talked to wasn't even from the airline - he was the public face for a number of them - and offered little sympathy. Instead he told us that we shouldn't have re-booked our flights, that we should have come to the airport or called the airline because now we've multiple different tickets instead of one booking that could be re-scheduled. This made my blood boil, not least because the website suggested just re-booking the ticket there, and trying to call the airline only left us on hold for 20 minutes before disconnecting. But mostly because had we waited to go to the airport before trying to get a ticket, all the flights would've been sold out and we'd have never got a seat! And they keep saying on the news not to go to the airport! Thankfully, we got a call from the airline yesterday and they agreed to clean up our little ticketing mess and confirm our booking out of here on Thursday. But is that too early? Every few hours they seem to extend the flight ban and they're already talking about all of next week being cancelled. What to do then?

What are the chances that a volcano would erupt grounding most flights through Europe one day before I'm due to fly back to Sydney? Higher than I thought it seems. Everything had been going *grand* since we came back the other week. The sun came out for the first time this year in Ireland, we did our whole getting-married thing for the last time, I passed!! my driving test just yesterday, and I'm even an uncle again (and one month early!). Alas, but now it looks like we're stuck here indefinitely. The airport is closed until at least tomorrow morning, so even if it opens then all the people who've had their flights cancelled today will have to get flights first and we might not even get a flight tomorrow. Not to mention any connection from Abu Dabi. Of course not a peep out of the airline beyond the usual automated message on the phone. I'm told the last time this volcano erupted it was over 100 years ago, before flight, and that it kept erupting for a couple of months. I really don't want to take a boat back to Australia.