We took an awesome and memorable 10 day road trip (17th May 2019 - 27th May 2019) from Chandigarh to Amritsar via Himachal Pradesh. These are the notes taken every night from that vacation. I will publish them one day at a time for the next 10 days.
17th May 2019 Day 1 :
This is our second summer vacation with Reyansh. Last year we had gone to Singapore however this year we decided to keep it within India. Whilst planning this vacation all we could agree on was that we land on Chandigarh and take off from Amritsar. We could never agree or deliberate on what to do for the days in between.
As we kept postponing to plan the plan, the date to take off came very near, and so we decided to make the best use of this unplanned trip. We decided to make it an impromptu road trip where we will decide the night halt and next days plan on the go.
Here starts the day 1 of this trip.
We took a cab from our home to Bangalore airport. The cab was booked through MakeMyTrip and the cost of Rs. 789 is a steal for us. Halfway through we realised that Reyansh is feeling sick. Is it due to motion sickness ?(happened in our last trip to Yercaud and Maheshwar) or is it because of some bad food he had ? We still don't have the answer. But we are worried as we do have a rough idea that we will go to Himachal on between Chandigarh and Amritsar. We have approximately 10 days!!!.
As we reached airport, the flight or Chandigarh is a non stop air Asia flight. Reyansh slept for an hour in between while me and Richa couldn't. The funny part was that Reyansh had a couple of glasses of water before he went to sleep, he got up as the cabin was being prepared for touchdown. As soon he got up he wanted to pee and cabin crew refused to allow us to leave seats due to turbulence and aircraft was preparing to land. This is the first time he could control his urge to pee, successfully for 15 mins, and he went to restroom as soon as we landed. I was prepared mentally, to clean up the seats after he wets his pants but it never came to it :).
After we landed in Chandigarh we took a cab to pick our rental car from Chandigarh railway station. We had booked a Ford EcoSport as it's a new model and were looking forward to take it for our trip. However as soon as we landed in Chandigarh , Zoomcar executives called us to inform that they don't have the EcoSport available as it needs some maintenance and they can offer a scorpio or a swift hatchback. We chose scorpio as it sounded like an upgrade. However once we reached the pickup site we realised it was an old scorpio which was already driven for more then 85000 kms and the driving experience was not the best. As we prepared to accept our fate, Richa saw an EcoSport and asked the onsite Zoomcar executive as to why we aren't offered that as we had booked an EcoSport. The exec on ground asked us to call the call centre. When we called them they couldn't offer it as it was booked by 3-4 people in next 7 days and they didn't want to apologise to all of them. I asked them if they could offer something else, I can also see some XUVs there . Finally they offered us with XUV W5 version. It had closed 908 kms before we took it.
It was a good upgrade for us.
We then drove to international dolls museum which was established in 1985. The museum has dolls which look like brides from various states in India, they also have dolls which represent culture of different countries. However the museum needs upkeep and a way to make the tour interesting. The souvenir shop didn't have any dolls on offer, which is surprising.
Next we went to Zakir Hussain Rose Garden which is spread over 40 acres and has almost 800+ variety of roses. The roses weren't blooming but Reyansh enjoyed running in open spaces.
In the evening we roamed around in the city and had dinner at a pure veg restaurant (Sindhi Sweets) in sector 17. The food was good and Richa also did some shopping .
I loved Chandigarh city, it's planned and can compete with any city in the world in terms of infrastructure. Can't understand why we can't simply copy the best practices from a city like this and make whole of India like this.
With this ...signing off from day 1. Tomorrow we go and sleep in Mandi . And need to visit Rock garden before we leave ....
Signing off day 1.
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