How many things do you think can go wrong in a single trip? And how desperate do you think the guys would be to still carry on?
It was Friday night and we 3 vacation deprived colleagues decided to go on a road trip
1. The plan was finalized at 1pm, but was followed by the usual dance of Yes and No… People agree to the trip, then start cooking excuses for why they are terribly busy and cannot make it. (sometimes I believe girls are less fickle minded than my friends) However by 10pm all were in sync.
2. First vehicle breakdown: Friday 10:30pm: My vehicle battery got drained due to insulation issue. (please note that all the 3 persons were in 3 different centers)
3. The never ending rains that evening making even the slightest logistic movement impossible due to never-ending traffic
4. 11:00pm finally we started, however within 200m the second vehicle was driven into a crater (3 feet wide pot hole without a bottom) It took us 30 min amidst heavy downpour to lift one of the tires of the car and slide it back to the road (getting a tow truck was impossible and the crater was too big and deep for a jack to operate
5. My shoe was a casualty of the entire exercise dooming me for the rest of the journey as I was not carrying an alternative.
6. The music system leads also got disconnected creating a lot of awkward silence
7. There was endless traffic at the toll gate followed by a second queue at the Tamil Naidu state entry resulted in us travelling a distance of ~40km in 5 hours on a 6 lane national highway.
8. At 3am when the road cleared up, I am getting frustrated as the car is travelling at 40km/hr. The driver is complaining that due to heavy rains, and possibly a headlight problem he is not able to have a clear vision to speed up.
9. BTW I forgot to mention, the 3rd friend was so delighted to find the back seat to lie down, that he started snoring (no stereo to drown the irritating noises)
10. So I forced him to park the car, with the clear intention of snatching the keys and commandeer the vehicle. However I discovered the tire that landed in that ditch is busted. It is wrong to call it a puncture when I can stick my finger in the hole.
11. We discovered that although there is a spare tire, the car does not have the right tools to switch it. So we traveled to the nearest mechanic, banged the door enough times to be greeted by the cursing of the guy who has just been woken from a deep slumber. (He changed our tire for less $2/- and yet we felt he was over paying him… God I love India)
One thing I must admire about my friends, they had been awake for the past 22 hours, worked hard the entire day and it’s almost dawn and we have another 6 hours of journey ahead of us. Yet in spite of all this mishaps (I would like to call adventures), nobody cursed the trip/planner/driver/car/weather/ location. I guess even the God yielded to our determination and it stopped raining and we could see the first rays of the sun.
We were back on the road, reached Kodaikanal by 12:30pm, slept till evening, partied at night, and drove back by 7am.
The remaining trip was also not boring. We had to literally drag our tired ass to 7 hotels before we could find one that had a vacancy. On the way back one friend had a minor case of motion sickness, while the other was so thrilled that the stereo was miraculously restored that he entered into an endless loop of breakup songs.
In short, I have been vacation deprived for the past 6 months and this trip was a real stress buster
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