Chennai Chronicles Part 1 & Post 12

Our trip to Chennai! I am writing my Chennai Chronicles 🙂

We had been planning this Chennai trip forever and by forever, I mean forever. And well, for multiple reasons, N’s uncle who is almost like a father to him since N lived with him during all his schooling, wanting to show Ojas Chennai, wanting to experience the brilliant Chennai road in the Cedia and for my love-hate relationship with the city (more on that in the next post and yes that will be the post for u Pal :p). So that is why this post is just a part of my Chennai Chronicles 🙂

But somehow,the trip just kept getting delayed and delayed and further delayed because we’ll think of doing in it winters and something will come up. Then later, in March we would say naa its too hot now. So this time, we decided, enough is enough. We must go this time whatever happens. We surely must.

So phone calls were made to cousins and uncles, to some friends and off we started early morning. A little after 6:15 or so, all bags packed and loaded, Ojas buckled into the car seat, the windscreen cleaned and shining, juices and munchies loaded. We started with a lovely weather accompanying us, we secretly praying that we could pack the weather in the boot and take it along too 🙂

The idea was to zip across and cross Hosur before 7am at any cost. However God and my husband had different plans, as soon as we reached the toll booth, N realized that he has left his wallet home. We pay a round trip toll and take a u-turn and go back home to collect the said wallet. Poor N, to his credit, he has never done it before and on the way tried to drive as fast as possible to save time.

Anyway, by the time we started from home again, it was some 7:10 and the trip-o-meter was set back to 0, we reached the toll gate and paid it one more time and headed again. The drive till Hosur was pretty crowded and it felt that whole of Bangalore is headed that side for the long weekend.

We reached Hosur (38kms) at 7:46, thought of catching a breakfast but somehow didn’t feel like stopping so close to home 😛 The Hosur-Krishangiri stretch is a pretty decent one, The roads are good but there is quite a bit of traffic and we made it to Krishangiri (87 kms) at about 9 am in the morning.

And just after Krishanagiri we decided to fuel up as well as catch up on breakfast. There was a MacDonald and Krishna Bhawan at the bunk but guess what? The Krishna Bhawan had some 25 minutes waiting and had run out of idlis. This, on the highway, so definitely all of Bangalore had decided to head out. We decided to grab something from the drive in of MacD and eat on the go. Though the drive in was not really working well. Instead of three counters for ordering, paying and collecting, there was one window where he was making everyone halt and place the order in the main counter inside.

What will it take for us to do things right? Small things like that? So the new spicy chicken and spicy paneer burgers were sampled and duly passed as better than the earlier ones 🙂 and post Krishangiri we took a left turn towards Chennai whereas the straight goes towards Salem, etc.

And this is when we found joy because the roads were relatively very empty post this turn and very very good. I think only fools like us holiday in Chennai that too in the end of April 😉 We started zipping away happily cruising at good speeds, reached Yellore (160kms) at 9:51, Vellore (206kms) at 10:21 and finally Chennai outskirts (322 kms) at 11:50 and that is where it started damn the traffic jam. From there to reach our cousin’s house we took about 1 hr and 2 mins for a distance of about 15kms . Sigh, traffic everywhere is the same I guess.

To be Continued in Part 2.