My Travel Travails

“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller,” so said Ibn Battuta. The different experiences and the jaw-dropping moments are surely worth capturing on paper. The world is like a book and when you travel you have many pages to jot down. It is so true that once you travel overseas you learn more about your own country than you do the place you’re visiting. You will keep comparing and wonder at all the cultural, social, differences between the two.
I never had any bucket list, but London would have been at the very top if I had one. As a kid, I used to read and wander into all the places on paper. The convent schooling always made me reach out to fairy tales and English authors and I would snuggle up in a corner and travel in my mind’s eye all over the globe. Being from a humble background, I never dreamt of traveling beyond our shores and ironically, I actually didn’t ever travel abroad. I was married to a businessman who never took a vacation, and when he died, I never had the means to travel.
Yes, I did travel to Mexico last year but that was just a fiasco and I was proving a point then! Quite a few amateur palm readers had told me that I would not travel abroad and I was bent on proving them wrong. I was told that my palm did not have lines that indicated travel abroad; the stubborn Aquarius that I am, I declared that I would carve them out with a knife but would surely go. And I did travel although I ended up only seeing the airport, my son’s house and hospitals! But can anything else be more important than watching the birth of my grandson? Every pain in my spine was worth it!
In the summer, my son randomly invited me to join them for a holiday to London, Barcelona and France and I jumped at the offer. It would give me more days to spend with them and especially, Arian, my grandson and also fulfill my much-awaited dream of a holiday abroad. I kept my fingers crossed and applied for my Visas. The tickets were booked and it was a matter of time before I flew. The palm readers’ prophecy kept weighing on my mind and I would shoo off the butterflies with some positive affirmations. The kids came home and we had some great moments of bonding, the wedding in the family went off really well and suddenly D-day had dawned. We were all packed and ready to leave to the airport and the driver came late to drop us off. My son was really agitated and had us all on tenterhooks by repeatedly saying that we would miss the flight to New Delhi.

Once we breezed through to the airport and through the security check, my son slumped down relaxed and declared that he could have had a half hour more of lay in, instead of waiting there to board. If he was any younger, I would have whacked his backside: p.

We flew to Delhi by Air India flight and had a good 12-hour layover which we spent in my dear sister’s house. Arian kept us entertained throughout the day and late in the night we left to catch our flights.

Details and pictures of my travel to follow……..