Summer Vacation Travelogue - Part 1

Finally! I woke up an unemployed man! I never thought that the day would dawn when I would be happy about this! But hey, shit happens!

It was also the day when we would finally take out Scarlette on a long holiday – stretch her legs, so to speak. We had a nice and early 7 am start and thankfully, there was no traffic till Kharghar. Scarlette responded beautifully on the expressway too, and we were in Pune, come 9 am. Satara came up a couple of hours later. This made us decide to skip lunch at Satara, and take a call when we reached Kolhapur. Little did we know what sort of impromptu entertainment we would be subjected to! We went to a nice looking hotel in Kolhapur, which advertised an AC Family Room. We discovered that there was indeed a family room. The only problem was that the AC was not switched on. We pointed this out to the waiter and he told us that there was a power cut. When asked whether they had a generator, he replied in the negative. Now, this was extremely puzzling, especially because I could easily see a couple of fans working! When I pointed out this anomaly, the waiter scratched his head and went to his boss for clarification. He returned with the explanation that the AC was not working. We protested and told him that if he was not prepared to provide us with AC comfort, we would look for a different restaurant. One more visit by the waiter for confirmation later, the AC remote was produced from some alcove and the AC was finally switched on! A few minutes after we had taken our seat, we began to feel a distinctly warm breeze, which was definitely not coming from the AC. Further investigation revealed that the windows in the room were still open! No harm done, right? We called the waiter and told him to ensure that all windows were closed. He was successful in this endeavour as far as the first window was concerned. When he went to the second one, he discovered that the window did not have any shutter at all!!! The less said about the food there, the better!

A couple of hours later, we were finally in Amboli. Nice place, cool weather. All in all, a nice getaway from hot ‘n humid Bombay! More later.