speed 2 - cruise control!!

NE-1, National Expressway no. 1, is the best road i have ever driven on!! bloody 6 lane highway and i was stuck in an old Tata Inidigo!! With much huffing and puffing and prayers to keep the tyres intact, i managed to reach, hold yer breath... 140KMPH!!! Woohoo!!! Unfortunately, there was more of a rush to be obtained by worrying about the car disintegrating than the speed itself... Those huge expressways are pretty much all long, straight and empty... It wasn't half as exciting as the ECR run back home even though 4 times out of 5, i don't quite hit 110...

Still, the expressway, part of the golden quadrilateral project, is a sight to see after sunset... There are no lights on the expressway except a short stretch around each toll gate, and so the entire stretch is lit up like several dozen christmas trees, by virtue of the reflectors alone... its quite a sight to see... the endless line of lights seem to stretch away into the sky...

I'm particularly thankful for the tyres though. After the fiasco of... 2004 i think it was, where on the to and fro drives between chennai and bangalore, we lost a total of 3 tyres. On closer inspection, the tyres appeared to have melted clear down to the radials. Apparently nobody expected us to drive a Ford Escort at noon, on an indian highway, at 120kmph... I don't know why. It seemed to do wonders for the tyres... :|

Thats all for today. More from the local movie halls, shopping malls and book stores tomorrow...

p.s. I just remembered... My parents are still in the process of furnishing the house in baroda and so we happened to stop at a furniture store to book the sofa they'd picked out a few weeks ago on a previous trip to Ahmedabad(thats where the NE-1 ends, in case i haven't mentioned). Anyway, the point is that i finally got to see what an easy-chair felt like... Come on!! I'm sure all you guys must be at least a little bit curious after watching chandler and joey moan and groan with ecstasy while lowering themselves into those things... And i gotta say, totally true!! I sat down and pushed backwards and the little leg-thing popped up. At this point i kinda blanked out and was left with a vague impression of plenty of clouds and people with wings strumming on harps... Now all i needed was for somebody to feed me, bathe me and install a big screen somewhere in my line-of-sight, and i'd have been hard pressed to tell the difference between heaven and earth... :)