Chennai to IBR

 

Pulling out from Mumbai airport.  We were flying Vistara Airlines. I had never heard of it before. It wa a nearly empty plane.

The Vistara magazine had an article about Kodaikanal and Mahabaleshwar (a different Mahab)

Once we got above the clouds, we got to enjoy the sunrise. 

Masala omlet with a potato cake.

Remember this butter?

The flight was uneventful and we even got to Chennai a little early.  Add another 1 hour and 20 minutes to our actual flight time. Making it 19 hours and 35 minutes flight time.

Chennai airport, women's restroom

We were met by the driver of the Radisson shuttle. Note his sign.

The Radisson was very close. It was also very fancy.

We picked up a few things from the complimentary breakfast buffet to have for our lunch.  They wanted us to load up our plate and then let them carry the plate up for us. They were not happy when we refused.  

The room is also way too complicated for me.  It was a challenge just to figure out how to turn out the lights and close the drapes so we could take a little nap. 

The shower was amazing.  Water comes from everywhere.   But it was a challenge to get the temperature right.  The toilet seat starts warming up when you sit on it and there were about 5 settings.  I did not study the settings.  

Our complimentary lunch.

George managed to take a little nap.  I will just try to go to bed early tonight. We ate our lunch.  Our driver arrived at noon to take us to the Ideal Beach Resort (IBR) in Mahabalipuram.  What a wild ride.  Riding on the "wrong" side of the road, lanes are just a suggestion, and horns are a required form of communication, It was about an 1 1/2 hour drive south of Chennai.  Ros had arranged with Mr Thayalan's company to give us all rides from our various locations to the IBR.  

When we arrived we were right behind Shanta, Vivian, Paul H and Rebecca (all classmates).  Paul Z and Janet (his wife) and Don and Carla (his wife) were already here.  George has met all of them before except for Rebecca.  Rebecca has done most of the planning for our get together.  She has done an amazing job.  We will meet others of the class later.  We checked in but the rooms were not quite ready so we went to lunch. George and  I just had pop. By the time lunch was done, our rooms were ready.  We are in #34.  

We are on the second floor and we have a little balcony.

Lots of crows.

Rebecca (our Rebecca) flew in on the 1st with her daughter, Marry and 3 of Marry's friends (Ashish, Guru & Sultan).  They are staying in a different hotel.  They got here around 5:30 pm.  

Paul Z and Paul H

Rebecca, Don & Vivian

Ashish, Guru, Sultan, Mary and Rebecca

We wandered around mostly on the beach.

Line of fishing boats

The Indian Ocean water is warm like the Atlantic.

Practicing the zoom on my camera.  I need to work on holding the camera steady. 

Nice pool

Sultan, George, Guru, Ashish, Marry, and Rebecca

Irani Tikka Panneer is what I ordered.  But we had a lot of other dishes that we shared.

Fun decoratively cut up onion on top of the Sultan's biryani.  There was a lot of food.

My class ended out sitting at a table close.  I would go over periodically to visit. 

Shanta, Vivian, me, Rebecca, Paul H, Janet, Paul Z, Don, and Carla

Rebecca and her gang got an uber back to their hotel

Now I am ready for bed. A little wine and blogging first

It is an Indian Sangiovese from the Nashek Valley in Maharashtra near Mahabaleshwar.  It is ok.  Smoky and a little on the sweet side but drinkable. 

We are on our way

 I received a text message bright and early Friday morning saying our flight from Seattle to Charles de Gaulle was delayed.  That made our connection in Charles de Gaulle very tight.  I called Delta to see if this was a problem.  They told me that we did have a possibility of going on a later flight which would go through Mumbai on our way to Chennai.  We opted to risk staying with our current schedule.  After all we had 46 minute in Paris.  

Nathan picked us up at 7 am and got us to the airport.  Traffic was not bad so we got to the airport in plenty of time.  

We decided to do carry-on so that there would not be a chance of losing our luggage somewhere.  The ticket agent assured us that 46 minutes was plenty of time in Paris.

I had TSAPre✓.  So I got through security with plenty of time to get my coffee, even though someone else got my order and they had to redo my order.  George had more trouble because they had to open and search his suitcase.  I guess they were questioning all the stuff George was taking for Rebecca.  

Portland airport

We took off on time.

Typical Portland weather

It was not a full flight and it was a small plane so George and I could each have a window & aisle seat. 1 hour and 10 minute flight.

The weather was clearing as we neared Seattle

Fly-by downtown Seattle.

Seattle airport

When we landed in Seattle I got a message from Delta indicating that they were automatically trying to reschedule our Paris - Chennai flight.  That concerned me so I walked down to the help desk.  They assured me that they were not trying to reschedule our flight.  They suggested that we wait until we get to Paris and if we do in fact miss our flight then there is another flight that will get us to Chennai at 8:55 am instead of 12:20 am. 

Very helpful help desk

We had lunch while we waited (4 hours)

We split the Garden Plate.  We did not want a big meal because we knew that food was waiting for us on the flight.

We had a nice flight.  We each got a pillow and blanket.  It was a 9 hour and 28 minutes flight.  I watched 3 1/2 movies: A Simple Wish, Kubo and the 2 Strings, Cinderella, and part of Mississippi Masala.  It just did not grab me.  

Dinner was butter chicken for me and mushroom risotto for George

It was quite tasty.

Not so tasty. For breakfast.

On the plane I got the message again that they were automatically rebooking us.  When we got off the plane there was a ticket agent standing with a sign for all Chennai, Mumbai,  and Dubai passengers.  Now we had no choice.  Because of the delay we missed our flight going directly to Chennai, so they put us on a flight to Mumbai and then a connection to Chennai.  We get in about 8 hours later than we were supposed to. But at least we had a reservation.  The agent snuck us through a back door for a shortcut to our gate.  She gave us a food voucher but we had no time to enjoy it.  Besides we were both full.  

Charles de Gaulle airport vertical garden.  No time for Lauderee macarons. 

We got on our flight to Mumbai.  It was an Air France flight.  The food was not as good as the Delta, which was surprising.  We had 2 meals but I did not take pictures.  Both flights they did push the wine.  This was listed as a 7 hour and 37 minute flight. I watched An American in Paris with Gene Kelly. Great dancing, but not a very gripping story. Not very many movie choices. George enjoyed hearing all the French.

I started playing Angry Birds

Then George played as well.  

The flight was a little longer than the 7 hours because we had to circle over Mumbai a while.  I might have dozed a tiny bit.

We finally landed at 11:48 pm so I had a chance to quickly play a game of Wordle.  It was the first chance I had for March 2.

Mumbai is huge, clean and very quiet at midnight

Everything went pretty smoothly

But then we got to the line for going through security for our flight to Chennai.  Ugh.  It moved very slowly.  No Global Entry line for faster service.  After being in that line for about 45 minutes an official came by calling for people connecting on a domestic flight.  That was us.  There were several people who followed him to stand in another line, it was actually a line for first class but since no one was in that line we were the lucky ones.  We were there about 15 minutes.  We had to take almost everything out of our suitcase.  They took my nail clippers, tweezers, and folding collapsible scissors (which do not have a pointy tip and are not sharp).  Oh well.

We found a place to sit and hang out.  We had about 5 hours to wait for our next flight.  I called the hotel to change our shuttle time.  I had tried to cancel the hotel earlier but it was too late so we decided to go there so that we can shower and have a good breakfast before heading to the beach resort.  The earlier plan had been to go there and get some sleep.  We will have our same shuttle to the beach.  So we will get there the same time as before only with no chance to try to sleep.

I saw a sign for filter coffee which I HAD TO HAVE. Ah this is the life: filter coffee and blogging. 

So far 17.75 hours of actual flight time.

So I am going to end this and put the last leg of our trip to Chennai on my next blog entry.