Work has been keeping me very busy these days and I have not been able to make any posts or spend time going through the wonderful posts my fellow bloggers have been sharing recently. I get to quickly browse through some of them during lunch or other breaks that also have become pretty short lately. I may get  to pen down a comment or just hit the ‘Like’ button, depending on the time I get in the elevators or walk between meeting rooms. Weekends are even crazier and TGIF transitions to Monday morning blues in a jiffy. Kids’ activities, birthday parties, laundry, cleaning, grocery, getting ready for the week ahead – I’m running out of breath just to list that out.

Many of you know that we were on a short vacation in India this past December. I wasn’t planning on making a post about it, but now that I’m hard pressed for time to cook, click and write a detailed recipe/story, I thought I’ll at least share some pictures from the vacation.

It was a very unusual vacation for us in many ways. We had booked our tickets several months in advance when we came across a good deal. This is very unusual of us because normally we don’t even start to look for deals until the very end. When the vacation was just around the corner, Chennai, my home town got lashed with torrential and record breaking rains that our generation had never seen or heard of. The dilemma about our travel lasted till the very end and finally we made up our mind to fly, but to a different destination, Bangalore.

In a way, the change of plan worked out to be good as we got to experience and explore Bangalore the way we had never done before. Our earlier visits to Bangalore were always for a couple of days with very crisp/limited agenda. This was our first visit that wasn’t time boxed for us much there. We had about ten days for ourselves to spend the way we wanted. We ate out and shopped to our heart’s content. We yearn for home cooked food from mom’s or mil’s kitchen whenever we are in India, but this time we ate almost every single meal out. Of course, we had friends and family there that had us over for lunch and dinner. Nevertheless, the number of times we ate out this time will be a record for many many years.

It is not typical for us to do a vacation within vacation while we’re in India. But we did it this time, it was awesome and we intend doing it every time going forward. We took a quick three day break to spend at a resort by the backwaters in Kerala. That was the highlight and most memorable part of the entire vacation. A beautiful resort surrounded by serene backwaters with the temperatures in the low 80s, what more would you ask for? It was a pure delight and bliss to wake up to the beautiful houseboats and a big breakfast buffet every morning. A gorgeous swimming pool surrounded by beautiful tropical trees, board games, good naps after a heavy lunch, boat rides on the backwaters, and cultural programs after dusk  – these were the things that hijacked and kept us away from the rest of the world for three lovely days.

Sigh, as all good things come to an end our vacation did too. We returned to Bangalore and I headed to Pune and the rest of my family back to the US from there. You may have read my post about my stay in Pune, if not, hop over to that. It will be an entertaining read!

Hope you enjoyed the post as much as I did creating it. Appreciate if you could leave a feedback.