If everything I’ve done so far wasn’t a little bit crazy, my next two flights take the cake for proving my insanity. If you’ve been to Dubai for more than three days, you probably know that no matter how much you try, you will end up at one of the shopping malls. They’re good shopping malls, but after having been to each and every one more times than I can count on ten hands, I’m a little bored of them.

So I decided I’d instead spend half a day flying to and from Muscat. I’d fly out at 0830, and be back in Dubai by noon. At 40 minutes of flying time, MCT is the shortest hop on the EK network, and the turnaround would earn me a whopping 50 tier miles on the enhanced Skywards (or something in that ballpark). And I figured, that while I was racking up enough flight time and sectors to have done a RTW, I might as well do the shortest flight on the network. I’d do the longest too, but this trip was in Economy.

I’ve actually written up a fairly detailed report of my trip over on the EK forum. But here’s the gist of it.

I spent 20 seconds packing. Wallet, phone, passport, noise canceling earphones. Then I wasted 5 minutes at document check while the agent tried to scan the QR code on my e-boarding pass as it spun around on my iPhone. Blame techonology.

I wandered through the airport like a homeless person. I mean, who gets on a flight with no checked or hand luggage? Anyway, whatever I would need was in the lounge. Once I’d got through the maze of people that Dubai Duty Free is, I found myself pouring glasses of Moet 2002 down my throat. A new champagne recently introduced in the lounges as a replacement for it’s inferior cousin, the non-vintage Moet.

I had a quick bite in the lounge, thankfully, as we were given 5 minutes to eat our meal onboard. The outbound flight was quite uneventful, though the presence of someone in 25E beside me was quite disconcerting. Also, the 40 minute flight was delayed by 40 minutes - how's that for on time performance? Apparently the thing that pushes the plane back broke down, and the only spare was being used to wheel the sheikh's container of rubies and diamonds across the courtyard of his palace.

Muscat was a breeze. Transiting in Muscat, that is. When I got to the gate though, the gate agent probably mistook my e-boarding pass for a weapon of mass destruction. She went hysterical, saying I needed a paper boarding pass. Maybe I should have got one for the collection! Eventually she managed to locate me using the sequence number, which was all very good till the agent at the door leading to the bus refused to let me get on because he was equally zapped by the e-boarding pass. ‘Wait till the end and board with First Class’ he said. Fine by me.

When I got back on board, the 2 FAs at 3L and 3R were quite amused to see me in the same seat on the turnaround. I don’t know if ‘amused’ is the right word to use – it might have been that they thought something was seriously wrong with me. But I’m an honest guy. I told them I was doing it to rack up some extra miles, which probably didn’t help my case. At least I had an empty seat beside me this time!