Sunday, April 23, 2006

The Road trip (Part 1 : Pre trip)

Late in the night at Mad4Mex a Mexican joint in Philadelphia’s University City District, a usual haunt for Drexel students (read poor and hungry desis) and working people (slightly better off then the earlier mentioned hungry desis) staying on the outskirts of Philly. So here was this motley bunch of five people sitting in the farthest corner around a round table sipping long island ice teas and tucking in morsels of delicious Mexican food. Lets call them Sa, Sh, Su, Ro and Meg (What the f***!)
The night passed on uneventfully with random talks and even more random jokes, until one moment of madness in a fit of drunken stupor someone suggested to go on a road trip to Chicago. Who suggested? Well umm, now that is a very irrelevant question. The point is, “A ROAD TRIP TO CHICAGO!” I guess I made my point clear. But such was the hour and such was the state of these five people that they got into an animated discussion chalking out how to go about and arranging all things for a successful road trip. The date decided 7th of April 2006 and the crew decided to call two blissfully married people to make it the Drexel seven (Sa, Sh, Su, Meg, Ro, He and Ru) to Chicago. Feeling very happy (and did I forget to mention tipsy) all of them (the drunk five) decided to make a toast on the occasion of the day they planned the trip.

Thankfully sanity prevailed when the day dawned bright and clear (yeah! I can hear people yelling, Philadelphia weather bright and clear on a weekend, no way, you must have been drunk, trust me this was no hallucination on the author’s part. You might now be wondering who the author is? Another irrelevant detail), the trip to Chicago was hastily abandoned after the enormity of the task at hand became really enormous. Actually it was Sh, who started complaining (Yeah I can hear peels of laughter from Su and Ro). A week passed by without any discussions on the road trip. But exciting things can’t be kept under wraps for long. Soon all of us were itching for an adventurous outing.

Spring break heralded another round of aimless talks, rambling emails, leg pulling and trying to find ways to kill time. But then the things became serious and finally it was time for concrete planning and execution. After exchanging 100,000 emails within a span of 2 days the final plan was to go to Pittsburgh first and then check out neighboring Cleveland. Stuff to do in Pittsburgh was check out downtown, go to Mad4Mex and spend rest of the evening eating Mexican food and drinking Mexican liquor(oh no! not again and did I say Mad4Mex? Yes, the main restaurant in Pittsburgh! Why Mad4Mex? Still confused, then read para 1) and then go to the temple to cleanse ourselves of all the accumulated sins. Saimmediately looked into how much would it cost to rent out an SUV and forwarded the details via 100,001th email, which was promptly followed by 100,000 new emails. Sutook over from Sa and reserved a mammoth to haul 7 a**** to and fro. Meg looked into what to do in Cleveland and came up with some place called as “flats” (Is it something to do with the type of women roaming that place? This was Su’s prompt response to Meg’s email).

The date was fixed for Friday the 7th of April 2006. Another problem, a serious one I must say, cropped up. We were 7 of us, 5 guys and 2 gals. The problem was of accommodation for all of us. Sh knew a couple of guys and Meg knew one gal in pitt, but Shubham’s friends refused to accommodate 5 wild guys under the same roof. The girls had it better off (I guess they always have it better off). No accommodation in Pittsburgh and the time was fast running out. If at all anyone of you had lost faith in god then here is a chance to reaffirm your faith. God exists! Two days before the trip Sh’s friend Inspector R (well a character in a movie which were going to shoot on location in Ohio) in Cleveland offered his house as a resting place for our weary a****. His offer came as a bolt from the sky and I would say god helps us in many ways which go unnoticed by us mortals.

So at this point everything was set except for the music to be played on the way. This left a lot to be achieved in too short a time. The onus fell upon Sato burn as many audio cd’ possible. But Sa was notorious for listening to only soft songs. but he did his best to dig up some songs which all would like. But it was too much to expect from Sa. He knew before hand that half of his collection wouldn’t be played at all and the other half wud be played as the last option. Sigh! Thank god for small mercies! The rest of the details were taken care by others. So just a day to go and people were all raring to go zooming across to the west on one amazing, super charged and fun filled road trip.

As you know there are some things which are not in your hands, you may do what you want, you might plan all that comes to your mind but, but you can’t go against destiny. You might not believe, but trust me each moment in our life is governed by fate and you can’t rewrite fate as Meg would tell you. The most excited person, the one who suggested this trip and without whom we wouldn’t have even ventured for this sojourn had some supernatural power working against her. A post lunch time email from her higher ups (I am sure there was god’s hand in this too) assigned a strenuous task for the weekend we were supposed to be in Cleveland and dashed her hopes of accompanying us on the trip. This was shocking for all of us and left us in a lurch. There were ways of circumventing this and there was still hope that she would join us. In the meantime there were other forces (read the great big bad old weekend weather) conniving with the mighty hand high up above to stall our maiden expedition. The weather in Cleveland was predicted to be just above freezing the day we were supposed to reach and for the rest of the weekend. Then Megfinally confirmed that she was backing out. This double whammy depressed the rest of us with talks of either postponing or abandoning the trip taking shape. But enough was enough and come what may we decided to move on and face every obstacle that may come our way. Come rain wind or storm Cleveland here we come to rock!

Ps: this is the pre trip story….keep your eyes open for the details about what actually happened on the trip. The story continues………