I am glad that I have joined the online blogging community and today, on the first working day of 2008, I have got the opportunity to post on it too.
This post is about my christmas vacation in Himachal Pradesh with my husband Vikrant. We started our trip on 20th December 2007 by the Kalka shatabadi, scheduled at 5.30 p.m from New Delhi Railway Station. My father-in-law came to drop us to the station and we had met him in C.P. I was quite thrilled as we were going for a vacation after a long time, for a long time. The train journey was as usual except that the guy sitting next to us was asked to get up from his seat by a girl who thought that the seat belonged to her. And, she had claimed that without seeing her ticket :) , and when that guy showed her the ticket, she went back to check hers, to realize that her seat number was 67 and not 64.
We reached Kalka at 9:30 P.M sharp and all I could see around was people sleeping on the station, near the platform, on benches, near booking window. But one thing was common, they all were sleeping in a shrunken hurdled posture, with mostly black blankets and they all slept in bunches. It was quite cold that night.
We tried to check the time-table for the next morning's train to Simla, but someone smiled and informed us, with a whiff of impossibility, that its booking starts at 2.30 A.M in the morning. Got a cab and fixed him for next morning :)
On reaching the hotel, the receptionist said that he has no information of our reservation, and pheww, this is what I was waiting for. Vikrant opened his cell phone browser and downloaded the reservation email. The receptionist gave us a very respectful look, as we were (to him) quite tech savvy.
With that we entered our room, only to be welcomed by a huge spidey! With a few moments of scaring each other, we locked the spider in the wardrobe of the room and got ready to munch some home cooked food we had got packed with us. It was blissful to eat that food and we retired to the bed with that blissful feeling.