Parents Trip 2008 | Day 1

It was 24th of July and the start of promising 3 days. It was a third trip in a row in 3 years.Monsoon and few other reasons earlier, made us to deviate from the Kerala houseboat trip to this Kodaikanal. As usual lot of pre works and plans were in place. Kodaikanal being major tourist place, finding shelter for 30 persons was a big task. Kubhi found a lovely place and literally drove till the rest of the trip single handedly. Me deviated into my MBA studies and Vinoth stuck with his office tasks, Kubhi worked the rest of the things nicely.

Generally we used to integrate families at Bangalore; however majority of the parents living in Madurai and rest of the places, ingeniously they have been integrated by various trains and busses to Kodai road (near Madurai). Krish managed to get all the parents and the bus (Yes, bus this time) from Madurai to Kodai road. ‘Team Bangalore’ took the express train and with 2.5 hours of delay we reached Kodai road.

Before testing their patience further, we ran into the bus and settled. This time Dinesh’s father and sister and Ramesh’s parents have newly joined. And Kavitha Arun, Bharathi Vinoth (first time as couples to Parents Trip) and our beloved Senthil (when I heard he is joining, I asked my guys that is he aware that this Parents Trip.. 😉 ). It was nice to have him and his smile never fades. Lets see who is the girl going to have the previlege to see it every morning. With a ice breaking session we started our trip.

Day I

We had our breakfast in a roadside hotel which provided decent and tasty food. We occupied the whole hotel and the youngsters took a table and ate in group, no matter whose plate and none knew how much and what we had. Sometimes peopke stole Ramesh’s plate from next table and returned the empty plate. Well, back to conscious.. 😛

Hilly roads and hairpin bends didnt awake many of us including me. My 10 days of MBA exams and the preparations had its toll on me.

First stop was Silver casecade falls. Just the little falls on the road side. Nothing to say about it.

Around the midday we reached the Kumaragiri homestay in Kodaikanal. It was beautiful and compact. With a decent small grassland two huge valley facing villas gave a warm welcome. Sometimes individual cottages will fail to give a togetherness feeling, but this gave..

After refreshment, home made lunch was served which was really tasty and we didnt hesitate to fill as much as we hard to.. 😉

Coker’s Walk

We havent had much for the day and lazily took off to Cokers walk. Weather was dancing between drizzling and mizzling. We were equipped and many didnt bother. We had a slow walk with as many photo sessions. This time, my head was the one to suffer as the total number of cameras were five and Senthil and Krishna topped with the number of photos (around 1000 per cam). Senthil clicked many good pics and time to say “good clicks dear”. My inner scorpionism sarcastically making me to write they are the reasons this post took whole 2 weeks of time in collating, resizing, naming, clipping and coding.

hmmmmmmm.. Happy works, however!! 😀

Lake

After that we went to the Lake and persuaded the boat club to ride for the parents when they were almost closing it. By that time, youngsters took cycles and already started pedalling. A good round of 5KM cycling made them tired and so does the ‘day’ was tired and evening took over that. We returned to the homestay and had snacks. (We generally concerned about the food and snacks; There were times when we bought 5000 rs of snacks for 10 persons for 3 days 😉

We postponed the Campfire for the next day counting the mizzling.

Sleep in that weather with a good rug; I bet you will have the best sleep of months.

I had, and hope others. Dreamless deep sleeps, like the gap between Switch On and Switch Off.

Day II

It was subpackage trip.. 🙂

We were to walk lower altitude of some 8kms and to have breakfast. Then to even further lower altitude where a beautiful stream was to be presented. All of it to us. Few were tired and opted to the cars to the farmhouse. Rest of us walked.. We owned that road for 8 kms with beautiful, really beautiful views. We stopped for photo sessions, passed beautiful serene mini falls, ate and collected pear fruits.

When we reached the farm house, we were not only hungry but exhausted. Had lovely breakfast. Few wanted to stay back as the rest of the trek will be hard. Most of the parents and few younsters stayed back. We started to walk again. It was the period right after nourishing rain. So the path was extremely hard. Leeches were better in earlier trips :)). But this wild berry plants (in tamil : Ulumil) were so thick enough not to allow anyone through that without few scratches. Everyone of us had many scratches. Who bothers however. Its being lower altitude, it was not at all cool. After 120 minutes of walk we reached to a place which came to eyes all of a sudden. A stream made by the nature in 100s of years with huge rocks. Hidden deeply inside the forest.. The place could be a coolest hangout place for the day if its 120 mins of hardest walk can be bypassed.

None waited; in no time all were in stream.. to cool off their long hard walk. I stayed on the rocks ignoring the tempting stream. After that the packaged food lemon rice and curd rice got into visibility. They were the worst meals of the trip. However we ate it with our snacks. Thanks for the snacks purchasing team.. ;-). With few other photo sessions, we started moving back to the farm house. This time it was uphill and we were tired. This time we took even more longer route and ended up in a beautiful small falls which was small but good enough to give the best water massage. Well, my guys again got into that. Again I was in no mood for that falls. We had a good time and bath there and then we started back to the farm house which was one of the most tiring walk.

By the time we reached the farm house, part of the parents team was on their way to the bus which we parked 8kms from there. Rest of us stayed back; Vijay and Praveen were on their way to the bus by walking. Bravo, youngsters.. In 30 minutes Qualis returned and we had been picked. On the way we picked Vijay and Praveen too (they finished almost of the 7 kms). Bus took us to our homestay.

Tired and cold we had good cups of coffee, Tea and few both with snacks. We announced the camp fire. 😉

Campfire is the highlight of the trip generally. We used to have our own Talk shows. You got to be a part of it to enjoy it. This time, we had couple of games and shows (Hosted by Bharathi Vinoth) using dice. We had a feed back session too. Parents really felt proud and happy for their trips and so did we.

Day III

After photo sessions, we vacated the homestay and the next stop was Kurunji Aandavar temple. Vinoth and Myself excused ourselves, however after a masala tea we went inside the temple. A small one.. So what, temple is temple.

It was mid of the day when we were outta that.

We have started our trip back to Madurai. Well, Kavitha stole the show by singing some songs. Almost everyone sung (well, no comments on that please). :))

First stop was at Vinoth’s house and we had courtesy time. Really its good to see parents mingle with each other and find new relations. They are happy and ofcourse in turn who else could be happier than us?

Next stop was at Kubhi’s home. We spent rest of the evening there. In the late evening we packed our special food and started. Bangalore train was sooner than the chennai train. So we had to split and bidded good bye to the chennaitties.

Had gala time in the train and came home. With that, the trip came to end and 2 days after that I am back to my den in SG with chweet memories.