Oh Chicago! Living in Peoria, Chicago often feels like a gateway to all kinds of magical lands! Sometimes quite literally, as the O’Hare airport has been the starting point of so many of our adventures! And in so many other ways – whether it’s a stroll down the Magnificent Mile, an afternoon spent at Navy…
Cardboard Regatta at DHS
A couple of weeks ago, as we were heading out to Costco – Manasi asked us to pick up a couple of boxes. She had to build a boat, she said, for a Physics project. And not just a little paper boat, you know, the kind we’ve all floated in rainwater puddles – but a…
A ‘Shabdanjali’ for Lata Mangeshkar
6th February, 2022, the ‘Nightingale of India’ was silenced forever, plunging an entire nation into mourning. Saying that Lata Mangeshkar was an incarnation of Devi Saraswati herself would be no exaggeration! For the last 8 decades, her soulful voice has held us all in a mesmerized spell – and her towering legacy will no doubt…
For the love of libraries…
A little shelf in a back closet serves as a temporary bookshelf – for books borrowed from the library. And it so happened that one particular week last summer, between Manasi and me, we had – wait for it – a whopping total of 19 books checked out and waiting to be read!! I have…
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
The original intention to come to the Smokies was to hike – like the hiking bootcamp we did in Colorado! And although we did get distracted by the charming Gatlinburg, we did manage to get in some good hiking! Crossing through Gatlinburg, and into the Great Smoky Mountains Natural Park – the contrast couldn’t be…
The Smokies – Pigeon Forge & Gatlinburg
Anybody know where the Smokies are? Somewhere east of Illinois, the complementary bracket to the Rockies in the west? Really? Aren’t the Appalachians in the East? No, no, the Appalachians are in South America – wait, that doesn’t sound right, isn’t that the Andes? Ok, final answer now, ready to lock it – Alps in…
Travel in the times of Corona
How’s the travel going, folks? Until 2019 – 2 visits a year to India, a couple more domestic vacations, not to include the weekend getaways. Now? Now, I feel like a plane grounded due to a technical fault!! Luckily enough, earlier in the year, when it seemed like this nightmare was ending – my dad…
Memorial Day weekend getaway
It has been a long, long break from blogging for me. Several reasons – of course, the most obvious – no prizes for guessing this one – the Covid pandemic! Personally, too, for reasons not as obvious – this last year and a half has been debilitating – I literally had no words left at…
Tales of Ahmedabad
As much as we like to travel, once we land in India – it’s all about the family. And even when we do travel within India, it is usually to meet family. Our trip to Ahmedabad was no exception – we were headed there to spend a weekend with Ajey’s aunt and her family. So…
Munich & Salzburg
What we miss most of our expat life is all the traveling – and we have tried to keep the adventures going as much as possible. A couple of years ago, we took a 3 day stop-over in Amsterdam on our way to India – and it worked out so great, that this year we…
The road to New Orleans
In all of these years of living in Peoria, we must have driven the I-55 to go to Chicago countless times. Not quite as often, but the I-55 has also taken us down to St. Louis several times. And now, here we were, taking the I-55 all the way south, all the way to the…
A Madrigal Knight!!
At the end of 8th grade, Manasi told us she was auditioning for the Madrigals – and that is the first time ever that we had even heard of Madrigals. I gathered that this was an audition choir, and was mainly for juniors and seniors. Really, we weren’t expecting much out of the audition, except…
A place called home... 