I have been wanting to write about my visit to Kufri but for some reason, this kept falling off the radar. I visited Kufri for a conference in January 2019. While I had been to Kufri twice before, this was my first visit in the winter. I was excited because this was my first time visiting any place where there was snow. My travel to Kufri took me almost 14 hours from Chennai - a combination of flight and road travel. The road trip took longer because once you are past Dhalli near Shimla, the roads are covered with ice and driving can be trecherous during the day, but late evening and night can be merciless.  Well, I managed to get to Kufri all right and in one piece and into my resort - #Sterling Kufri. At check in, one of my junior team members asked me to join for an early morning walk and visit a field of snow. I agreed.  At 630am the next day, I was up and walked out of the resort to sheets of ice on the road. Its fun to walk on ice, just dont get over-conf...

Friday, 8th March, 9pm: After a long day at work, I was winding down and looking to retire early for the night. My wife - Sakshi walked in and started to discuss about the weekend ahead. I wanted to groan and be grumpy😩 but stopped short (been in this situation before, being grumpy doesn't help...it pays to listen) One of the ideas she suggested was hitting the beach away from the city early morning to watch the sunrise. Our son Ahaan would love to play, building sand castles, waves...perfect plan, we would have the whole beach to ourselves. Sakshi likes to get up late on the weekends, but she had made an exception here. I loved the idea (good, I listened...a thousand points to me and the points don't matter 😊). We planned to have breakfast right after, it would be the best way to spend the morning. Saturday, 9th March, 530am - we were ready and raring to go. We live about 20 minutes from the beach, so were there fairly quickly (not much traffic in the early hours). L...

In our daily  lives, we tend to get absorbed into every nitty gritty, that we forget to make some "me time". I had heard and read about people taking bike rides but had not made the time myself. A casual conversation with Hitesh and Salil over drinks and dinner one night; out of nowhere the idea of a morning bike trip to watch the sun rise at Mahabalipuram was up in the air. No sooner was it up, we grabbed it and set a date - 17 Feb (D - day). It was a Sunday, perfect, we could rent a couple of Enfields and yeah, it was not a long trip, (80km to and fro) , a few hours and it could work. Salil already had his classic 350 so we only needed 2 bikes on rent. The cogs were turning. Next day, I marked my calendar and sent the invite to Hitesh and Salil; promptly accepted. Did our enthusiasm wane? I had been travelling and busy with work (more blogs to come on those trips) and was wondering if things had kind of died down. I had not even checked if we could rent bikes, what rate...