Ready ... Get set ....

Sometime in mid-November 2008

Me: Come on da ... going in a car will be so much fun ... you can all just sit and have beer in the backseat while I drive ... you guys anyway dont know driving ... what else do you need ... i am the one who will lose sleep and drive ... so I should be the one having a problem with this idea not you guys ...

Bhatta: Yesterday at Hebbal signal, these two guys in shorts came riding in a full dusty bike right beside me and asked me the way to Hyderabad ... i told them the way and asked them where they were coming from, they said they were going from Mumbai to Hyderabad to eat Hyderabad Biryani !!! Now thats cool man ... we should do something like that ...

Thats when I agreed that this trip had to include our bikes.



Sometime in early-December 2008

Me: Whats going on people ?? who's done the reservations ?? where all are we going ?? Are your bike's ready ?? Are you guys serious or not??

Ajay: Dont worry dude, just get your bike ready and come to our house on 23rd night.

Thats when I agreed that the plan for this trip was to have no plan. No plans,no reservations.



The weekend before 24th December 2008

Me, Ajay and Ashwin, the three riders, gave our bikes for servicing and went shopping to commercial street to buy "lucky charms" for our trip. Leather gloves, leather jackets, chains .. not the bike ones .. neck chains, bracelets, rings ,studs ... phew .. it was a long sunny afternoon ... it was only after coming out of Commercial St that we realized that we had bought nothing. After loafing around some .. no lot more around MG, Brigade and Residency I & Ashwin actually bought our lucky charms. I got a black-wire chain with a Taurus printed on a metal strip (the other side of the metal strip had something in Chinese which I assumed to be lucky) and Ashwin bought a thumb ring with some random design. Yeah baby, we were ready to roll.
I also checked in many camera shops for a Black & White film roll for my Dad's old Minolta SLR camera. Its only then that I realized how rare a Black & White film had actually become. I called up a place on Brigade road which I had heard as one of the best places in Bangalore for all things related to cameras and photos. She told me there was only one roll left with them, and I gave her my name and rushed to that place and bought it. Now I am no pro in taking photos using SLR's (not DSLR's) and i have no idea what are the different factors to be taken into account when clicking pictures on a Black & white film. I just wanted to have photos in Black & White on film for this trip and thats it.

The day before 24th December 2008
The only thing left was a small little sweet pillow for a similiar sounding bum of mine. This I knew was a must based on my previous biking trips. I was always thinking of a folded turkish towel but one of my friends suggested a pillow. I managed to find a shop and got a nice fluffy pillow (a word of advice for whoever might do the same thing, dont be a kanjoos, buy a pillow cover too).

I then left to Marathahalli in the early night so that we could start on our journey the next morning towards discovering ourselves by getting totally lost.