Honeymoon Horror Stories – II

You’ve heard me ranting on Facebook about how two of my published blog entries just vanished. Don’t know if this is God telling me not to bore you with details of my honeymoon, or simply WordPress acting up.

This, then, is my last ditch effort to try and talk about the crazy adventure that my honeymoon was. If this one disappears too, I give up!

So where were we? Uh yes. Stranded. In a secluded area early in the morning.

We were pretty demoralized, both of us. And an awful lot of quiet. Mister made a desperate attempt at conversation.

So nice trip so far, eh?

Nice? Nice? We’ve covered like one fourth of the distance, and we’re already stranded in the middle of nowhere. Even the fucking sunrise looks like a fucking sunset. What if someone kidnaps me? What if there’s a potential rapist nearby? What if someone robs us? What if the bike just dies? What the fuck do you mean ‘nice’?

see for yourself. how do you know this isn’t actually a sunset?

I was fuming. Then Mister reminded me of all the times that I thought my life was going nowhere, and then things suddenly started looking up, how there was always a general theme behind all the things that went wrong with our lives.

We were meant to be together, but we had to go through a shitfest to get together. Think about it. No shitfest, no us!

I calmed down a little. Keep talking.

Then he talked about how we met time and again but only got together much later, when we had been through all the stuff we needed to go through in order to come together. You need to learn to be thankful for what you have. Glass half-full. Always. And now I’ve to call the mechanic.

While he was making his phone call, I reflected on how intelligent my new husband was and how badly I wanted a half-full glass of Old Monk what he said was totally in line with my ideology of “it all comes together in the end”. So when he told me the mechanic said all we had to do was put some 2T oil into the fuel tank and take it easy, I be’d thankful and decided to take all future setbacks in my stride. So much so that I kept quiet about my lower back being sore until I nearly fell off the bike. Mister insisted that we go a little out of our way to Solan to get the bike tested at the Royal Enfield service station, just in case. I threw a fit but eventualy gave up agreed.

After Solan, I couldn’t handle the backache and we decided to spend the night at Shimla. I hate Shimla. Not more than Mussourie and Nainital, but I hate it. A lot. It’s tacky and touristy, two things I dislike in hill stations.

the view from the balcony in our resort at Shimla

We only spent a night in Shimla,  and hung out at the Mall Road, buying little gifts for Mister’s daughter. Btw, I hate how every hill station has a Mall Road. Can’t people come up with more innovative names?

The best thing about Shimla was the hotel we stayed in. It’s called The Peterhof. It’s huge, old, and spacious. The food was completely unpalatable. We ordered a soup, vegetable au gratin and a steak sizzler. The first two tasted almost the same. I’m vegetarian so I didn’t try third, but Mister made his this-doesn’t-taste-like-anything I’ve-ever-eaten and no more was said on the subject. We brought back fruit, a knife, and two plates from the mall road in the evening. That was dinner. That and a half-full glass of vodka. 😉

In the morning, we skipped breakfast (we did that a lot on this trip, preferring to eat on-the-go at roadside dhabas.

The bike took a while to warm up, and as soon as we crossed the tunnel (there’s  a blink-and-you-miss-it tunnel that you’ve to cross when you’re on your way out of Shimla), the bike stopped. Just like that. One moment it was fully functional, and the next moment we’re stranded again. At one end of a tunnel with crazy-ass traffic honking behind us. Mister dragged the bike to a corner, visibly frustrated. The damn thing weighs a lot. And there was at least 50 kilos of luggage on it.

I walked ahead, asking people if they knew a Bullet mechanic, and eventually found one about 200 meters ahead of where the trouble started. About an hour was spent diagnosing an issue that took about 5 min to fix. Paranoid Mister insisted that the mechanic take a test ride to see if the bike was indeed ok and I threw another fit but eventually agreed. The mechanic left with our bike.

Ten minutes later, I was sure we would never get to see our bike again. To be honest, though I do love our bike, I was a little excited about the possibility of the mechanic taking off with our bike. More adventure to write about on the blog, you see!

But the guy came back and announced that the spark plug was indeed the culprit and that we were go to go. So we go’ed!

More to come in the next post. If this one actually gets published, that is.