Our adventurous Journey from Vrindavan to Lucknow

We just came back from our long weekend in Lucknow. We, that is Ramona, Apra and I. It has been a long time, more than two years, that we did this kind of journey within India. Yes, you counted right, we had our last weekend trip in India when Ramona was pregnant. This means this is the first such journey within India together with Apra. It was, as expected, an adventure, from beginning to end, but a very nice one!

We had booked the trains quite a while ago already, as they tend to get very full. So we had our reservation for the Thursday evening train at 10 pm. As it is winter time and trains can get delayed, we checked online and read there that our train was on time. So we started on time and reached the train station in Mathura early enough to make it comfortably to the train. Very comfortably actually, because signs said the train would be 4 hours late due to fog! For the internet website, that obviously didn’t seem to count as delayed yet! The official time was thus 2 am Friday morning but workers at the station told that the same train of the day before arrived in Mathura at 6 am in the morning! What were we supposed to do? Go home and come back at 2 am only to then get to know about further delays? Wait at the train station, maybe for eight hours or more?

We decided not to take any chances with our three-day-holiday but instead quickly booked a flight last minute for the morning. Apra however was not happy with the change of plan at all. The whole day long we had told her we would go by train and now we were at the train station, there were trains everywhere, why didn't we sit in one and leave? She urged us to finally get into one of them and was disappointed when we tried to explain her that we would go back home instead!

That's what we did however and we could even lie down a bit before we had to start to the Delhi airport at one in the night. Arriving in Delhi, we got to know that the flight, too, would be delayed for two hours. As we had arrived on time for check-in, at 3:30 am, we thus had another 5 hours at the airport until departure.

Apra, having slept at home and in the car, woke up at the airport, fresh and ready for the new day! She was so excited to discover that she was at the airport, she was laughing with joy! She marvelled at the aquarium, had some idli for breakfast and took many rounds on the escalator. It reminded her of Germany, where we had taken escalators in all shopping malls and was thus shouting out from time to time "Apra is going to Germany!"

We then had a smooth flight, which Apra enjoyed because she came ‘to the moon’s home’, and finally reached the hotel, only three hours later than we were supposed to reach, had the train been on time.

Although one could see this as a rough start into a holiday, we enjoyed this rescheduling, rebooking and changing of plans. We had a positive attitude, had decided that we wanted to be happy and not get stressed or annoyed and Apra had fun anyway!

Most of all we were happy that we had decided to fly because the next evening we got to know that the train which we had planned to take finally reached Lucknow 12 hours later than scheduled! No, flying had been the better thing to do!

I will tell you more about our long weekend in Lucknow tomorrow and the next days.