Setback

We were to leave on Thursday night for Mumbai and catch the flight to Europe from there on Sunday night after spending the weekend with Vibhat and Jing. However we got very unpleasant news from our tour operator Cox & Kings that the date we had booked for (15th) was overbooked and we would have to go on some other day. They gave us a choice of 13th and 19th. The 13th date was a funny situation where the tour was actually for NRIs in England (the basic tour started and ended in London). The local Cox & Kings manager did an aggressive sell for the 13th date, going to the extent of slightly dissing the 15th tour ("it'll be a mostly Gujju crowd and Gujju food..."). Unfortunately for him, I'm very allergic to sell jobs so I got more convinced that we shouldn't take the 13th and we decided to go on the 19th.

Of course we are very bummed about the whole thing. We are spending a huge amount of money (2.5L on the tour itself and then lots of smaller stuff) on this and it really off-putting to suddenly have the schedules changed on us like this. Also we won't have the time with Vibhat in Mumbai. I'm not good about making a fuss in these kind of situations so all we got in return from Cox & Kings was 1000/- each to cover for some of the expense of cancelling and re-booking tickets to Mumbai from Bangalore.


Given the extra time, one thing we are doing is making a quick trip to Hyderabad this weekend. Priya has to pick up her B.Ed. degree certificate from ICFAI and it will be good to catch up with some of the friends in Hyd, including Siddhu, my nephew.