Tricia and I realised that we would not be able to make it to Goa for many reasons. For one, I had just gotten a contract from Infosys, which would overlap and I would be Hyderabad for almost 6 weeks. Secondly, we are thinking of heading to Goa in March of 2005, when all the kids will be worrying about exams, and so it will be tourist free. We are travellers not tourists.

We got together with some of the guys and planned a ride to the Pune Yezdi Club. After a few no shows, we were reduced to Bruce, Venkat, Praveen, Tricia and me.

We had planned to leave early on Saturday, but since Tricia works night we decided to leave by about 10am. Bruce was supposed to meet us at my place, but plans suddenly changed and we met at the Barista in Bandra. I could hear a scraping sound from my bike and I had no idea where it was coming from...

Met at Barista, where Venky as always looked like he had a grudge against everybody. We got on our bikes after some coffee and picked Praveen, who had just recovered from some serious "tarmac trauma". We headed out towards Chembur-Panvel-Lonavla. As we rode, Venky wanted some order in the riding and I offered to sweep since I have no issues with lower speeds to make sure stragglers don't stray.

Venky wanted to be in the middle with Bruce leading. We were in the formation for about... 3 minutes, when Venkat spotted some open road and roared ahead. Bruce and I stayed in formation while making rude gestures involving Venkat.

A little further, as we entered New Bombay, we were at a traffic light when suddenly my bike started going in reverse... WTF! I had heard of the legendary Yezdi reverse gear, but this was the first time in over 10 years of riding that it happened. I let my bike die, pulled over and kicked her to life again, all was good. By then there was no sign of Venkat. He was miles ahead.

About 30 kilometers later, as we were picking up momentum, that is to say Tricia, Bruce and me, since Venky the mad tambi had picked up momentum quite a ways back, we crossed the flyover near Siemens. At the peak of the flyover Bruce's bike suddenly died. I was right there, so we quickly pulled over and stopped. Now I was under the impression that his bike being a little on the older side, had over heated and possibly siezed. So we decided to wait it out till his bike cooled down. By then the insane chai boy with the accident prone man were about 10k ahead of us.

After a 10 minute wait, his bike still wouldn't start, so I asked him how his bike stopped. I made me think his points were faulty. Now I wasn't carrying any tools and besides that, I don't know how to set points in older non-CDI bikes, so I rode off and found a mechanic who was too young to know how pre 1985 bikes worked, but he gave it his best shot. By now the brave but manic tambi arrived with his scraped man friday. After the poor mechanic was insulted by both of them for a while, he almost gave up.

At that point, Venkat was going to sell Bruce's bike to anybody who was interested. Bruce felt quite bad and offered to turn back, but Venkat didn't stop spewing hate. I'm sure we can blame his parents for this. But Tricia put her foot down and said "nothing doing, Bruce is riding to Pune". Finally, I tried to fix the points with lots of help and guidance from Praveen. Suddenly his bike roared and we were set.

By now we had been delayed by about 100 minutes, how do I know? I'm pretty anal about things like this. But Tricia was BURNING. She had a bad sunburn...

We rode the few miles a good 'ol Mickey D's or Macca's or as my brethen say it, Mack Donaaald. Had some nicely nasty Big Macs, ice tea, coke and headed out of the conforting air conditioning, into the blazing sun. We rode for a few more hours towards Lonavla, and as always Venkat being the team player that he is, was far ahead of us.

After Bruce's bike died again, we stopped at a known mechanic just before the ghats, when our machines would be subjected to serious stress of climbing. Since our bikes are 2 stroke, bad for the environment, but are great to go uphill on. We fixed Bruce's bike permanently and moved ahead, into the twisty roads, which made Tricia a tad bit nervous, but gets me rocking. She got in the groove in a bit.

As we finished climbing into Lonavla, we found the place that Pia, Mukti, Shay and Vicky had been put up for the weekend, a nice bungalow overlooking the vale. Nice. We played with Shay and ate some chips before we headed off to our machines to ride off again.

We reached Pune around 9pm, about 4 hours after scheduled time. At which time Praveen wanted to take the Pune-Bangalore by-pass road, which is a fabulous road, but takes you away from the city center. We ended up in Aundh. Now I have lived in Pune and had a general idea where the hotels were and Aundh certainly wasn't the right place for mid-range places. After another exausting hour, by which time, my temper was getting a little short, we found a decent place, near Fergusson College. So Venkat, Bruce, Tricia and I decided to crash there. Vinod was unhappy about our decision, but I'm more comfortable in hotels.

We headed out towards Nandu's for parathas, since that was the only thing open in Pune at that time. On our way there, near Corporation, we saw another nice looking Yezdi. Tricia and I decided to ride on, but Bruce who knew him waved and rode on too! He caught up with us and told us he was Ashu from Bombay. How cool is that? He joined us for dinner. We also wanted some beer after that, but everything was closed. Unfortunately, Vinod was very unresponsive during dinner, but.. oh well...

We headed back to the hotel later and chatted and watched tv, but we were exausted and crashed easily. The next day we woke on time, but due to unforseeable circumstances we got delayed and got to the Pune's Yezdi Club Annual Meet, by about 45 minutes.

We got a shock when we saw the members of the Pune Club. Now, I think of myself as a very approachable person, but the Pune Club was very..., how shall I put it... ummm, not my thang. Nice people, but not my type. The average age was 55. The entire event was in Marathi. Now 50% of our contingent did not speak that language, so eventually they were lulled to sleep. There we a lot of speech giving and lamp lighting. In fact, Tricia was even called on stage to light a lamp. That tickled me endlessly. The food was decent too.

The bikes there were awesome. So many beautiful machines from so many years and the funny thing was that most had the exact same colour of paint. Kind of takes away their individual personality, like communism. People loved my bike. But I was told that my bike was a lot like Venkat. She was reatarded since her timing was a little off. Bhau or "Pau" as Venky the non hindi speaker calls him, looked at my machine and told me to get a new timing plate, which Prashanth from Bangalore very nicely offered to mail. More toys to play with, Tricia says. And, she's the one with a camera/radio cell phone!!

Anyways, we headed off from the Club meet and headed towards Koregaon Park. Near Pune Station, my bike just stopped at a traffic light, and when I kickstarted her, she backfired real hard and scared an on-duty cop, who was about 2 feet from the bike. I think he soiled his undies. I lost sight of everyone.

Thankfully, Mr. Naidu, with his 50's Jawa caught up with us and we rode together to German Bakery for lunch and drinks. After that we went to another restaurant where some of the boys had beer but I avoided it, ofcourse Tricia was giving me the evil eye at the time too. ;)

We left a little late at about 5.30pm, and rode towards Aundh/University Circle. From there we hit the highway, where I saw a girl in "salwaar-kameez" on a cruiser bike. I was quite pleased. We hit the highway with tanks fill of fuel and roared towards Lonavla. Ashu's bike overheated... but we headed towards Lonavla regardless and we got there just before sunset and I got some awesome pictures of the highway... have a look at them here.

We left Lonavla at about 7pm and started down the highway. It was almost completely dark and we were enjoying the downhill curvy ride. I was leading the pack. About 40 kilometers before Bombay, Bruce's bike overheated again. We stopped right across a gas station and a little "dhaba". A "Dhaba" is a truck stop. The is fabulous. Spicy and meaty. We had a "Chicken handi", a full chicken cooked in a crock pot on an open wood flame. Excellent! Praveen poor boy was vegetarian.

After dinner we got on our steeds and rode off with the waiters at the Dhaba watching us in awe, perhaps they were staring at or bikes or maybe the healthy tip.

We got to Bombay at about 9.30pm. After a short stop for good byes, near Bandra-Kurla Complex, we rode off in different directions. Thus ended a fabulous albeit tiring weekend.