Bangalore-Mangalore Trip: The Making

People do not like long posts. Hence, I am writing this travelogue in three parts. Here is the first one, The Making... :)

Did you ever have a backlog in any subject in college? If yes, then you can understand the joy of clearing one.

I had three backlogs. Ooty, Mangalore(Udupi) and Munnar. I missed these three trips due to several reasons in the past and it is difficult to persuade everyone for going again on the same trip. I completed the first backlog last weekend by visiting Ooty with Ashu.

This was another pleasant weekend which took away second backlog i.e. Mangalore/Udupi.

This was the first time I traveled in a car for such trip. The trip was joyous but not as satisfactory as a bike ride would have been. I will try to capture whole route and incidents here but I won’t be able to do that as successfully as in the case of Ooty trip; the reason being I was not riding this time and sadly, I don’t know how to drive a car. :(

We (I and Ashu) had planned for this trip last weekend during the Ooty Ride. We were again ready to go on two bikes riding solo. As the week passed, many people added to the trip most enthusiastic being Shetty who wanted to go in his new car, Maruti Suzuki Alto LXi. It was easy to get people for a road trip in car.

When Naveen joined in with his car again an Alto but LX edition (without power steering), we had two cars and two bikes (Mine and Ashu’s). Shetty kept on pouring with all the technical details (like route maps, alternative routes, places to visit enroute, etc) whole week. Just one day before the trip, we got the final number of participants and I and Ashu had to shift to cars for the economy of the trip.

Finally seven people in two cars left Bangalore. I, Ashu, Naveen and Gopal in Naveen’s Alto and Shetty, his cousin and Prashant Pandey in the other one.

Note: Four people cannot sit in the car with Prashant Pandey because of sheer magnitude of his body in Y-axis! He is over 6’ and needs so much leg space that practically no one can sit in the back seat behind him :)

to be continued...