A trip that wasn't

One Friday night we were all scratching our heads to find a perfect birthday gift for Dielle. By exhausting all possible ideas I had already made my friends’ job a little difficult.

Vinod left early only to start thinking again the next day. Meanwhile, I poured a drink for myself hoping to better my thought process. Yash was savouring his drink as he always does. After a while my thoughts were all fuzzy. Royal Stag did it again; my few grey cells have this habit of going on a strike as soon as they feel some alcohol in the blood. Nevertheless, I think better without sweating my brain. "Everybody deserves to be pampered and we all need a little tranquillity now and then. D likes adventure and yes at times pampering as well."

Yash was taken aback when I made the above statement. Yash almost screamed, "How about a trek?" Vish improvised it by tossing up Gokarana as our destination.
Everything was planned and finally the ‘D-Day’ (read Dielle's Day! ) came. But, more fun was in the offing. In the morning we found that oil firms were on an indefinite strike. What the hell. I had told mum not to vote for Congress. She didn’t listen to me. They can’t even give us an uninterrupted gas supply.

The early morning excitement soon became a disaster. After endless number of calls to Bobby and Yashpal I had to call the trip off. No the story was not over yet, a twist in the tale was waiting. Bobby being a true juggler managed to arrange gas. Hurrah!! our trip plan was still afloat.

Knowing that 10pm is late night in Mangalore, we didn’t go out to buy stuff for the trip. No booze, no football and no sandwiches.

However, we started our trip at 5am, see we all are early-risers. lol

Singing, dancing and laughter full throat. I could sense that good times were ahead. Suddenly, D realised we are on the way to Udupi, "idlis on banana a leaf", she said in an overexcited tone. But to her bad luck, Udupivalas are not early-risers. No eatery was open. We had to wait for another 45 minutes to have our breakfast. Sipping steaming coffee and having warm idlis was an ideal way to start our day. As speed of the car increased our enthusiasm drastically went down. Idlis really made us sleep but Bobby had something else on his mind. He made us sing on his tunes or rather on tunes of his car’s accelerator. He was driving at 200kmph. I had never seen Vinod so alert. Meanwhile, we reached Gokarna. It didn’t give the look I was expecting. It looked like any other small town. But it was nature’s way of fooling me. As they say, best always comes later.

Meanwhile, as the car negotiated with the curves of the hilly way to the Om beach I was getting restless to see the famous blue waters of Gokarna.

To be continued…