Guru

I hardly fill my diary these days. It is literally empty. Good or bad? I don't know. Sometimes I am overwhelmed inside and I am on the venting mode. Months together I was so diligent in writing everything I felt. Now things have changed. Or have I changed? Life has so much to throw at you that you don’t try to question or ponder over anything! So here I am. 

I thought that I’d do some justice in at least maintaining a travel log here. Nowadays I have to dig my photo album and work through the notes to remember the names of places I visited in the past decade. I am getting organized, you know. I print photographs, tag places and dates in a journal. Although I like the e-albums, I love the hard copies. Don’t you prefer letters to emails? God knows how many letters I must have written during school and college times! I’ve still got tons that I received, my treasures :)

Back to travel journal. I visited some nice fall places this year. It was my long time wish to visit a friend in Lexington, KY (the birth place of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Abraham Lincoln, seriously I saw boards of former than latter!) and also the Great Smoky Mountains. Smokies has been on radar since my time in Charlotte, NC - during those really weird 8 months in ’05-‘06. I did catch some fall colors in Charlotte during Nov’05. It was brief but sooo beautiful. V wanted to visit Chicago, he’s been there before. But he wanted to stay in downtown, walk the magnificent mile, and more importantly meet his longtime friend too. So I came up with this brilliant plan of combining everything into one. My planning was so-so this time. To be honest, I should say it was awful. This is what happens when you intend to kill all the hard earned (m’eh) miles to buy flight tickets. The plan was to fly to Chicago, drive to Lexington, halt, drive to Smokies, halt, drive back to Lexington, halt, drive to Chicago, halt and fly back home. How’s that for planning? 

 

Anyways we’ve done some pretty crazy travelling in the past. All is well that ends well, right? This ended well too! We had to drive a good long 6 hours, passing through at least 3-4 states before finally arriving at Lexington. Guru, my bud, kept texting once every hour to check on our status. As the saying goes, yezhu kadal yezhu malai thaandi.. literally we met him. I think he was bummed that we came late. He peevishly talked to us during first few hours. It wasn’t my plan to bug him, although I’d love to do that from time to time. 

 Anyways he managed driving us to Smokies. We reached around 11 PM. I felt guilty that we were arriving so late.  Smokies was such a commercial place, and I didn’t have a clue. Guilt went out the door when I saw how happening the place was. We stayed at this beautiful cabin in the woods. Next couple of days just whisked along. Lots of driving through the mountains and some low level hiking.. gaze through foliage, stroll along the busy Gatlinburg downtown.. 

On the way back to Lexington, we stopped at Coumberland Falls. This place felt like past autumn, most of the colors had withered. Nevertheless a serene place…

Back in Lex, Guru drove us through the town. Ton of weirdo horse statues on the roads, neither majestic nor decorative in my eyes, just weird. Guru’s work was 5 minutes away from his residence, and we gawked at the fact. We spend hours together on road each day to get to and from work! We had tasty dinner at this Mexican place and crashed for the night. Next morning was the dreaded drive back to Chicago. Bid adieu to Guru.

You’d imagine that I’ll start writing about Chicago. There is an important entity in between Lex and Chicago.. What else? Lunch. We drove into Cincinnati's suburbs to catch a nice Indian lunch. With trip advisor and yelp who needs to worry? I googled for most reviewed indian restaurants around, and we ended up having a heavy buffet lunch! Rest of the drive back to Chicago was uneventful, except that we had to blast music to keep awake and watch the road :o) Finally in Chicago!
 

I was awed at Chicago’s downtown. No wonder, V got reminded of London a lot. We took a cruise ride through the channel, learning about important buildings. Then it was the stroll time… along the magnificent mile. Ofcourse shopping time too. We retired back in the hotel after the tiresome walking. We finally met Ramya next morning… also importantly her cutie daughter.. she was such a doll and we had fun playing with her. Ramya had prepared some delicious meal and our food (read: rice, sambar, potato) craving hence disappeared right there! It’s a sin that we still craved Indian food… bonkers. We flew back to San Francisco arriving home at 12:30 AM in the night (recall the miles ticket?) Worst part about arriving so late...I had an official trip to Phoenix the next morning. I had a flight to catch at 6 AM, thankfully from San Jose.