We arrived in India 38 months ago. It was August 2018 and our first time having a three-year tour (which we later extended for a fourth year). It felt like I had all the time in the world as I busily went about setting up our house and getting settled those first 6 months. My GSO work started around the 6th month at post and the intensity of the job immediately consumed my attention. I spent half of May and all of June 2019 away from my family at training in D.C. It wasn’t until my parents came in November of 2019 that we finally got around to traveling in India (14 months in!). We devoted 5 days to exploring Jaipur, Pushkar, and Agra (site of the Taj Mahal). It was lovely and made me eager to see more of India. But life got busy again and travel fell to the back burner. “We’ll travel our last year here,†I thought, pushing it off for a later date.
 You know what comes next. The pandemic hit India full force in the middle of March 2020. Less than two weeks later we were on a chartered USG flight to America where we spent the next 7 months riding out the pandemic. Our return to India in November of 2020 was not the grand return I had hoped, life did not resume to normal nor did we restart our traveling. Instead, we spent the next 6 months isolated in our apartment. With no vaccine in sight yet, we decided it was safest not to venture out – no trips to the Consulate, no instore grocery shopping, no get-togethers with friends, even outside. We were playing it uber safe.
In April 2021 things peaked again in Mumbai and we found ourselves on yet another flight to America trying to outrun the pandemic. When we returned to Mumbai three months later in late July, we finally began to find that sense of normalcy we’d been craving. Nick and I were now both vaccinated, Nia’s school was reopening in person for the first time in a year and a half, and case numbers in Mumbai were falling each week. I was still hesitant to travel given that Nia wasn’t vaccinated, so we didn’t do any travel in August or September. It was only when Nick went to Abu Dhabi for 3 weeks that I decided Nia and I should try our first trip. I decided on Mahabaleshwar because we could drive there and would have our own villa. We both had so much fun and with case numbers continuing to fall and over a billion Indians getting their first dose of the vaccine, we decided to chance doing an airplane trip in late October to Jodhpur.
Those trips reignited the travel bug in us and made me realize just how little of India we had seen and how short on time we were (about 8 months left). Other factors encouraging travel now were the fact that we had 4 Consulate holidays in November and temps are cooler at this time of year, making it an ideal time to see things. This led us to plan two 4-day trips for November. For both of those we’re going South—once to do some trekking and biking in the mountainous tea plantations of Kerala and once to explore the ancient ruins of Hampi in Karnataka. This seemed like a solid travel plan but then we were presented with another trip we couldn’t pass up. Our Community Liaison Office was arranging a group trip to the famous Maharashtrian caves of Ellora and Ajanta. And that’s how we ended up with three trips this month. That seems excessive, even to me, but I rationalize it by telling myself that it’s ‘travel crunch time’ and it’s now or never. I mean, it would be really sad to leave India after 4 years having seen only a small percentage of it. Feels like we wouldn’t have done it justice, especially given how rich in history and culture it is.
And so the travel madness begins! Expect lots of posts and pictures this month!
