It all started with an unplanned thought and arrival of a persuasive long weekend, which was followed by an all time desire to visit the ‘Shiridi Temple’. It was not too long until the thought had turned into a definite plan of action. The tickets were booked and I just discovered that my name was changed from ‘Mayank’ to ‘Mehek bhai’ ( with the usual Gujju courtesy of brotherhood).
The bus was scheduled to depart at 2100hrs and it was already 1930 so me and my friend hastily packed our bags, not because we were getting late but because it was a weekend and we had to enjoy the food before we leave the town. It was a bit of an experience to get into the right bus since the bus number was not known to us, the travels were usually experiencing high call volumes so it was a bleak possibility of getting through to them and ‘Mehek bhai’ was a non existent entity. Inspite of all this we got the right bus and that too on time.
Although the Volvo had a comfortable seating, with a small reading light and a nice air conditioning vent which was blowing good amount of air in rather cold weather, the interesting part was the company that we had with us in the back, front and right seats. Well, the one thing common between all of them (the company) was that they were all couples, the difference, all were from different states. The one towards our right were the Andhra couple, who were quietly relaxing while reading books, the one on our back seat, were the Gujju couple, who were also relaxing in their own way, doing a lot of arithmetic and talking to their relatives. The ones towards our front, the Bengali couple, were rather too exited about the journey and were trying to entertain everyone. My friend who was having a hard time stretching his tall legs had to exclaim kiddingly – ‘Have these people taken half a thousand to torture us?’.
We had the journey extended by 2 hours but it served as a boon to us since we reached just on time for the ‘Mandir’ visit. Reaching Shirdi , we quickly freshened up in preparation to visit the temple. Although it was told that it would take an hour to two of time to have the darshan, we were supposedly lucky to get the darshan of ‘SAI BABA’ in less than an hour. After the darshan, we did a visit to the museum containing artifacts and clothes used by ‘SAI BABA’. The museum had a lot of factual historic information which was unknown to us and so was a learning experience.
The sun had come up upon us and we were already hungry by now. Amidst the town, we spotted a cool MSRTDC hotel which had an amazing ambience and some great food. Although we had to wait for some time for the breakfast to arrive, but we never minded that after tasting the food. After the breakfast we got the thought of seeing round the small town and purchasing some memorabla but before that we definitely needed a hotel to recuperate ourselves.
We got a nice room in a fairly descent hotel at a fair price, so we took some snaps with the balcony view of the place, watched some television to get a good feel of vacation and freshened up in order to stroll the streets of Shiridi again. Already impressed by the hotel in which we had our snacks and convinced by the hospitality we already knew where we were going to have our lunch. After having a filling lunch we made our preparations to board the Volvo back to Mumbai.
The bus arrived and departed on time and it was not long before we knew that we were already out of Shirdi and in Nasik. We got some entertainment in the bus but this time it was in the form of two movies and lot of dance album remixes. We reached back to Mumbai quite in time at 2300 hrs. In short we had a nice trip, a cool and enthralling experience of a perfect short vacation visit.
