How it all began. . .

I always wanted and loved to travel. I remember cycling about 15 miles almost out o the town once when I was in the 6/7th grade without informing my parents and when I returned back I found all of them back home praying hard and standing out of the house worried. And then I got one of the worst thrashings of my life.
I wanted to carry on the same to the college life, but unfortunately I wasted all of my 4 years of college searching for partners to roam with. I was in the third semester of college when I wanted to get out of the hostel badly having gotten bored to an unprecedented extent.
I chose to ask one of my friends who'd always talked of plans of going out and freaking out. And he refused stating a very lame excuse which I don’t quite remember at the moment. So I got bugged completely and ended up packing my bags and taking a bus to Mahabalipuram early in the morning from Tambaram (a major inter-city bus depot in Chennai)
I spent the whole day roaming around Mahabalipuram and enjoying my first trip al alone. I ate and drank all that I wanted without having to take the consent or permission of anyone. And roamed as much as I wanted. Saw the ‘Krishna’s rock’ the ‘lighthouse’ and all the temples and caves, then at the end went to the beach and sat for an hour in solitude, quietly enjoying the breeze and the sound of the waves hitting the shore. On my return I had a surprise waiting for me. I was at the Mahabalipuram bus stand when the bus for Chennai came and I found this guy who was also getting into the bus, saying to his friend "arey apna bus hai, sala majal hai koi roke humko", and I replied " achcha? Aisa kya?” he looks back with all readiness to take me on only to discover that I was his classmate from school. It was Ujjawal from DPS who was a good friend of mine back in the 11th and 12th grade. I remember most of his pranks and all the stories he used to proudly tell about beating up people and sometimes getting beaten up.
He was a character I will never ever forget all my life. he was all stories of what he was doing there and I discovered soon that he was running an admissions' business there earning a gross of 3.5 laces p/a (Something I don’t earn even now working for TCS, 3 yrs hence) and that he was on his way to settle some issues with some union head there. So that’s the kind of character I had as my bench mate in school.
Moving on, I realised after that trip that I dint need a company to make a trip to any destination I needed to visit. I only realised this fact a li'l bit, in the sense not fully till I finished college. Which means I dint make a trip at all for the next 2 yrs till I went again to Mahabalipuram in the last semester after my project review with Iyer. Of course the final year was all too busy for me with the department fest, tech-fest and the cultural fest al coming together.
So that’s how things actually started far as my traveling without my immediate family is concerned. I’ll be describing all those experiences here on this blog and also those where I roamed around with my family, coz they’ve a different touch to themselves.