Loose Control One more Time...

The much awaited trip with my cute ones and my in-laws finally turned into reality and it was one of the most memorable ones.

In brief we visited sholapur, shirdi, basavakalyan, Bijapur, Kudalasangama and finally shopping at Ilkal and back to Bangalore.

We started early in the morning from Bangalore @ 5:30 AM to beat the traffic. As we moved out of Bangalore i was able to smell the clean air, beautiful roads with less traffic and very decent drivers. We were able to reach sholapur around 4:00 in the evening with three breaks( one at sira for breakfast/Tea Break just after Hospet/Lunch at Bijapur), the drive was not tiresome since the roads have been beautifully made. Thanks to the BJP government which took up the Golden Quadrilateral Project on National Highways, we drove on NH-4 and NH-17. NH4 drive is a two-lane for 200kms where in my zen was able to touch speeds of 150kph and NH17 drive a single-lane for 400 kms even on this road i was able to touch speeds of 130 kph.

At Sholapur, we stayed at Hotel City Park, it was a nice place and each one of us enjoyed a lot our stay over there. We had taken a suite, especially my daughter enjoyed a lot running here and there, the hotel has two restaurants, also has a swimming pool at the terrace it was neat and clean. We did a little bit of shopping at the local streets in sholapur.
hotel-cityparkhotel-citypark1

[Shirdi]
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We headed towards shirdi(300 kms drive), While driving UP we took a different route since we got an advise from the locale, and that was really tiring drive since we had to drive country side and if we ask for directions each of them gave a different route which was confusing and since the roads were state highway our speed was restricted to 50kph. At last we reached Tembhurni where we had a tea break at a small road side teawala,by the way i do suggest people visiting this place to have a tea stopover at Gajanana Tea House ! no great shakes about this place but the guy who prepared/served tea was so clean/neat and tidy oh! my god i felt for a minute that i need to learn from him, on top of it when we asked milk for my little one he cleaned almost all the utensils/cups used for preparing the milk. From tembhurni the next place was ahmednagar, while passing through ahmednagar we saw lot of Indian Army tankers parked majestically, for a moment i remembered !! Rise of Nations !!me building the Auto Plant and having lot of them parked around our city. If you are passing by please do stop over at the Asia's Only Cavelry(military) museum ,we then had breakfast and started again. Finally we reached shirdi at 12' noon. We went straight for the darshan and when we were done it was 1:30 PM, so we finished our lunch there and started, our next stopover was shani singapura. Beware !! as you near to this place you might be chased by young guys on bikes asking you to stop for a minute, my advice is please dont stop and take there advice, they are gonna loot you unwanted. You can park you vehicle start at the parking lot and head towards the temple. People there will try to tell that guys are allowed only with a dhoti, but its not true. Now when you are driving from shirdi to shani singapura don't miss the sugarcane juice junctions, i am very sorry but i didn't click any photographs over there, you can see an OX, taking rounds(grinding) the canes. I mean you don't get to see such things even if you pay money, and its not one or two stalls there are hundreds of them. Worth the Watch !!!. From there since there was an accident we had to take a country ride to avoid the traffic.

By the time we reached back to sholapur it was close to 11'o clock in the night. As soon as we all reached the room all crashed to bed.[Total drive was 600+ kms]

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[Basavakalyan]
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This was not a far off place from sholapur compared to day 1. So all of us started of relaxingly at around 10:30 in the morning, one more thing which i forgot to mention is that breakfast is served at city park which is complimentary. We reached basavakalyan around 12:00 noon. There is an ashram where we had our lunch and visited all the places in and around.
The drive to this place was also good, the roads were excellent my better half said it looks like as though you are driving in Texas.

Also you get to drive along the naldurga fort which is a excellent scenic drive....

The same day we came back to sholapur and visited the sidharameswara temple in sholapur.

[Back to Bangalore]
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The next day we started back to Bangalore and visited GolGumbaz

at bijapur, kudalasangama and a little bit of shopping at Ilkal and back in Bangalore.

One of the colourful Indian truck

Can you count the number of wheels ?

As i entered Bangalore was thinking of the traffic in Bangalore/work stress/and lot more and i was getting prepared for all them myself ;-)

courtesy of most of the photographs: My Loved One !!

Out of Topic: Below ad is the one which Australian Postal Department has come out with. How many of us really write letters(hand-written) these days ?