This happened a long time ago: the weekend of September 10 last year. I didn’t feel the need to write about it, simply because there was nothing special about it. I’ll devote a post to it nonetheless so that I have one less point on the ‘blogging topics’ draft I’ve saved on Gmail!
We were four people (Samrat, Anuj and Rahul, apart from me) on two bikes (my Classic 350 and Anuj’s Apache RTR) and we left Ghaziabad on Saturday morning at about 6am. We reached Mussoorie around 5pm and apart from a stretch on a toll road (about 75kms long) which begins just after Meerut, the road conditions were pathetic, to say the least, throughout.
We actually wanted to go to Dhanaulti which is about 25kms further from Mussoorie. I was told that that drive would be one of the most singular experiences of my life. But it so turned out our group wasn’t that enthusiastic in nature and ultimately, we left out on Dhanaulti. We spent a night in Mussoorie in a decently priced hotel just near the Mall road (yes, there is always a Mall road on a hill station!) and apart from having a very delightful non-vegetarian dinner (I don’t remember the name of the restaurant anymore, but it was probably the most popular one in the town when it came to non-veg food), there was nothing much that we could do.
It was raining heavily when we decided to leave the next day around 10am. The drive down the mountain was a memorable experience for me: it was raining lightly and more irregularly now and the view, both of the valley and the greenery along the way, was spectacular. We encountered heavy traffic in Dehradun because of the peak hour. It took us almost 12 long hours to return to Noida, mainly because Rahul, who was paired with me for the return drive, was whining like a spoiled brat the entire time.
Had we visited Dhanaulti or the company was more enthusiastic about the trip, I would’ve written this post more avidly. It was after Mussoorie, if I remember correctly, that I decided to try out a solo trip (which I actually made, a little later, to Agra).