Joy Ride - I

The trip was amazing and tiring as most trips I take with over-enthusiastic friends. It all started at noon with a long flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. The normally 5 hour flight took nearly 6.5 hours. That made a dent in plan A. Quickly and without much hesitation; we decided to go to plan B, which was “Take it as it comes”.

Pennsylvania
By the time I could rent a car, drive back to King of Prussia (a suburb of Philly) to my friend’s place it was way past bed time even for most late-niters. Soon as I stuffed my BK Veggie and onion rings down my throat, I went to bed to catch some precious sleep. Three hours later, my friend from his room gave a wake-up call.

“Hey, can we start in 30 minutes?”
“Sure – do you have liquid soap?”
“I will get it in a minute”

New Jersey
Following a quicker than usual morning routine, we hit the road to Trenton, NJ to pick our third friend. By about half past six, we were on our way to watch the wonders of fall colors with a coffee and a bagel from Dunkin Donuts. Traffic didn’t suck but the toll booths on the New Jersey turnpike did. They sucked our bloods out of our wallets.

New York
New York City came by and went. The exit numbers steadily increased and then dropped again to one. This could mean only one thing – we were in Connecticut.

Connecticut
Time to stop and change driving responsibilities apart from taking care of the pressure the morning coffee created in our lower abdomens. There we were. In state number four in less than four hours. I guess the Northeasterners never liked to be in the union after all. In California, one can drive for hours and still be a few hours away from the nearest border. On the road sides of I-95 and then the I-93, we could see the colors developing already. Anticipating a great trip ahead, we karaoke’d our way across New Haven with the really bad rental car stereo. Connecticut was smaller than Jersey, one more hour and we were in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts
Boston was in sight. We decided to hit the world famous MIT before lunch. All these days, I hadn’t realized that MIT was not in Boston. It was in Cambridge, which was across a gorgeous river at the verge of shaking hands with the Atlantic. What a spectacular place for an educational institution! Kayaks and canoes were everywhere with people surrendering their tensions of fast city life in the boisterous yet serene water. It was a picture perfect day with the sun shining as if it was a billion years younger and the skies blue with scattered white puffs.

MIT
It wasn’t noon yet as we walked towards a campus map to identify the statistics building, mechanical engineering building and the “Good Will Hunting” fame mathematics department dome. Unfortunately giving a map to three single Indian guys with no girlfriends AND no girls as friends is like handing a flower garland to a monkey, especially if one is a mechanical engineer, one an industrial engineer and one a statistician. After all the optimizations, the best route was agreed upon and meticulously followed. After a walk through the campus, we started snapping pictures at “must-be-on-photo-to-show-everyone-that-I-was-at-MIT” spots. One of my friends was curious to know “who-is-that-everyone-that-will-be-so-amazed-to-see-you-at-MIT”. We rejected his observation and headed towards the car.

Harvard
With a small city map to navigate through, we managed to drive from MIT to Harvard in the longest possible route. Soon as we parked, we were hungry and came down to an Indian restaurant by name “Tanjore”. Hoping for a wonderful South Indian buffet, we prepared our tummies for delicious idlis and vadas. To our disappointment, it was a North Indian cuisine with three vegetarian dishes out of eight dishes. We were wondering why they named it “Tanjore”. But we had done our share of thinking for the day. We were there to relax. After lunch, we walked hours through the campus of Harvard trying to find a Harvard sign for a picture. Amazingly, we couldn’t find a single Harvard sign inscribed anywhere on the campus.

Tired and our feet pounding, we decided to take on a small ride through downtown Boston with our little map. Maps and us were like a marriage between an old dying millionaire husband and a pretty blonde dumb young wife – it never worked. Realizing soon that we somehow lost Boston and the sun setting fast in the west, our next stop was Foxboro. The home of the Patriots on the eve of a Sunday afternoon game was unusually empty. The security denied us entry to take pictures and gestured us towards the exit. A spark went through my brain and I made a command decision to go to Rhode Island which was just 20 miles away.

Rhode Island
It was a dark and small state. Dark as it was night and small as it was in the Northeast. Providence was the only city I have heard about in RI. Rhode Island always reminds me of the Jim Carrey movie – “Me, Myself and Irene”. But to my friends, who were hell-bent to visit all Ivy League schools, it meant Brown University.

Brown
A chilly night walk through the dark campus and some unrecognizable photos to prove to the future generation that we were at Brown was followed by a long drive back past Boston to our hotel.

Dinner at Denny’s after another small lost and found expedition was soothing. The night’s sleep that was to follow felt even more comforting. My eyelids buried my tired pupils as my brain continued to ponder the day ahead – “busier and longer.”