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Journeys begun

 I am 50 not out.  Five decades of living on this planet.

In the course of this life I have gone through the natural aging process, starting as an infant, then toddler, then adolescent and young man, a single man to quite early tying the knot with who was to be my wife of over half that life to date.

In doing so I took many trips.  Journeys.  First within the sub-continent that was India, my birthplace and then post nuptials a trip that took us to the United States of America.

India is a vast country and our parents (the wife's family and mine) were both fond of taking the kids to new lands and places and check out what made it unique than our usual workaday place of residence.

This adventurous spirit saw us visiting the western deserts of Rajasthan to the tea growing hill stations of Ooty in the south.  Later with my wife and kid we would go and see the Taj in Agra and the capital city Delhi. All this early traveling was on the Indian Railways.  No flying for us.  Could not afford it and likely the logistics were scarce and not evident to us middle class folk at the time.

Wife and I flew out of India back in the 90s leaving then Calcutta to Bangkok with a final destination of Honolulu Hawaii.  Lewis and Clarke'ish or like the gold rushers we left in search of new frontier where we had found work.

Once stateside we traveled first as newly weds, then as has been weds, to countries and continents on this great big planet of ours.  Largely driven by curiosity of what makes people tick in these parts; compare and contrast life as we knew it growing up to if and why it was different somewhere else.  Of course all the time flying to and from.  Many road trips in America, a wondrous joy that I took to like a fish to water was on the US interstates.  Large ribbons of tar that cut across America, a country almost four times as large as India was.

A big reason to travel has and is of course was food.  What do people eat?  Would we like it?  Try it.  Where its made.  Most times the answer was a resounding YES.

So far having touched down on five of the mapped seven continents we can unequivocally say that taking a trip has been a very rewarding experience like no other.  Covid has certainly put a major cramp in the last 12 months but hope springs eternal.


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