Off to India

Brenda is staying at our house

3/30/2007 2:15 PM
Tick tock, tick tock… Four days until we take off and things seem to be coming together.  Cindy is the proud new owner of a lightweight down jacket for the cold nights trekking, my camera arrived intact, all the credit cards that were stolen by some ass-wipe at the library are replaced and the house is strewn with piles of clothes, electronics and toiletries ready to be packed (hopefully it will all fit...

Tomorrow we go to my god daughter’s debutante/graduation dance and then head to San Diego to celebrate family birthdays.  One last yoga class Monday and then it is off to Chicago for a night and on to India.  In case anyone local stops by between now and July, this is Brenda who is graciously house-sitting and fish-sitting for us (since she is such a seafood fan…)

3/12/2007 5:54 PM
We did manage to squeeze in one last trip up to Mammoth for four fun days of somewhat spring skiing.

Looking up Chair 23 at Mammoth Mountain - we may be wishing for the snow and cold this summer while roaming around India :-D

3/3/2007 11:24 AM
Well we finally managed to figure out at least where to go and just got off the phone with AA having booked tickets from lovely John Wayne Airport through Chicago and on to Delhi India for April till mid-July. 

We are going to make a brief, one night visit to Cindy’s sister Cathy and brother-in-law Robb and their three little girls (see the cute pics in the Chicago entry next…)

As far as planning exactly where in India (and possibly other places, Nepal, Bhutan, ???) we are going, we haven’t made it very far other than to know that we will probably start in Rajasthan (and hopefully burn some Hilton points at the lovely hotels in Jaipur and Udaipur) and definitely want to spend time in Himachal Pradesh, Laddakh and hopefully Darjeeling and Sikkim.

Cindy's Indian Visa

Wondering if all that heat will make us be wistfully dreaming of Chair 23 at Mammoth (we are hoping to get at least one more trip up there before April since it just snowed four feet) but figure that summer in the Himalaya’s cannot be passed up (wonder if I could extend this sabbatical long enough to ski in Kashmir!)

We started seriously trying to plan our next venture a couple weeks back and it has been a hilariously chaotic event - if you asked us two weeks ago where we were going, it was:

·         Option One - Nicaragua and Central America for a couple months - sounded nice and close and fun. 

·         Option Two - If you asked ten days ago, it was probably Australia, New Zealand and Fiji since Air New Zealand had some awesome deals and a free week at the Hilton in Fiji on the way home sounded like a great way to wrap up. 

·         Option Three - Next we found an interesting package trip that we could extend to India and Nepal that included about 12 days of seeing a few major tourist sites in N. India (Agra, Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi..) and ended up in Kathmandu.

·         Option Four - That led to investigating Round the World and Circle Pacific fares with airline consolidators. The next thing you know, we were talking to one woman about a flight that went LAX - Taipei - Bangkok - Kathmandu - Delhi - Kuala Lumpur - Sydney - Christchurch - Auckland - Nandi (Fiji) - LAX whew!  The fare was going to be about $2800 which seemed kind of steep.

·         Option Five - Not being the planning sort, I was concerned about the inflexibility of the Circle Pacific fare since we had no idea how long we would be in India before heading to Australia.  Since I am a dedicated American Airlines guy, I started messing around on their web-site and put in some multi-leg routes including LAX-Delhi-Auckland-LAX.  Interestingly enough, using AA and Oneworld (i.e. Quantas) that fare came up at about $3100 but when I searched just using American, the fare was only $1865!  The problem was it the Delhi to Auckland leg flew from Delhi to Chicago to Las Vegas to Los Angeles to Auckland - a total trip of 46 hours!!!  I called American and asked if we could do a stopover in LAX between India and New Zealand and that was possible so I held two tickets.  At the time, this seemed to be the best of both - we get to do India and environs as well as New Zealand and possibly Australia.

·         Option Six -  Then reality set in and we realized that 1) we still didn’t know how long we wanted to be in India and 2) Eight weeks in New Zealand and Australia would be pricey and probably something we could do later in life (as opposed to hopefully doing some trekking in the Himalayas).  The end result is that we decided to do only India.  This led to countless hours of “research” on the internet to figure out if we should fly into Calcutta and out of Delhi or into southern India and out of Delhi, etc.  At the end of the day, it was cheapest and easiest to go in and out of Delhi so this morning, we called AA and booked tickets.  Now the insanity starts!