Early morning tea!!!
Early morning...
We get to see some beautiful sunrises every morning.. this is just one of them...
Maj Ashwini with her 11-month old Vinayak... He follows us in the truck :)
Finished our ride!!!
Saree Shopping...
Kites stuck on the trees in Surat...
Lovely coffee at Mysore Care. Premila's cousin's place :)
Our senior most member - Bhagwati Oza, 78 yrs old - Beling felicitated by Mr Yezdi...
Our destination was supposed to be Surat. But since our accommodation was organised on the highway (Surat is 20 kms off the highway), we decided this was a better option. We leave from here only tomorrow for Valsad, our last stop in Gujarat. Day after tomorrow we will enter Maharashtra – State no 2...
We finally managed to measure our speed. We’ve been calculating it as 10 kms per hour on average, but have been surprised when we reached earlier. We are actually cycling at 20 kmph. We can add an hour for our breakfast break and another hour maybe for all the other breaks, including water halts, fruit breaks as well as our loo breaks, which seem to be quite a bit :)...
Today’s ride was good again. Lovely road, but much more heavy traffic so we had to be more conscious of where we ride. Everyone has strict instructions to only cycle in the cycle lane. But many times the cycle land becomes unusable because of sand, stones or glass pieces that are there. Then we have to come onto the main road to cycle. Also, many a times there is traffic coming from the opposite side, so we have to make way for them also.
We were ready to leave at 6am as usual, but we discovered a puncture on Vasumathi’s cycle. Then we all had to have tea as we did not get any tea at the place where we were staying. Eventually we started only at 7am. We were at Kamrej at 11 am i.e. only 4 hours, despite a 1-hour long breakfast break. I think the reason that everyone cycled fast and reached early is so that we all have enough time to go saree shopping hehehehe.. We found out that Surat has the largest saree market in the world. Almost all sarees go from here. How can we not go there.
We were then supposed to visit an animal rescue shelter where they treat the animals injured due to kite flying. They have a network of 250 people spread across the city that pick up animals injured during these few days of the kite flying festival and bring them in for treatment. We also visited Anita didi’s house and had tea. This was followed by a press conference organised by the South Gujarat Chambers of Commerce. That was then followed by a gala felicitation and function. That was then followed by dinner.. that was a long long day and we were able to get to bed only by 11.30 (two hours later than we are used to).. We were just too tired by the end of it. Hoping it does not reflect badly on tomorrow’s riding.
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