When we homed onto Europe as our next travel destination, the name that Ulhas chose was European Adventure, and I guess the universe decided to give us a real adventure!
The travel group was decided—Meenu and Praveen, Naiyya and Mohit and us. The cities were finalised and so were the number of days. Leave was sanctioned, a base plan was formalised, followed by the presentation by Ulhas and then began the booking of tickets and Airbnbs/ Hotels – and then the adventure began!
From Schengen visa rejection by Austrian Embassy, to Meenu giving a telephonic interview, to Rakhee and Gyan also joining in, to Naiyya and Mohit’s visa not arriving till the last few days before travel, there were rapid changes and anxious moments galore!
But the main challenge came in the form of the most unimaginable, unprecedented and unexpected situation—our country went to war! Not only was it professionally impossible for half of us to travel but morally wrong too, so we decided on a cut off date. We would cancel all our bookings, and try and get as much of the money refunded as possible. And then an unexpected thing happened again—the ceasefire!
It opened up the possibility of continuing our trip and we all heaved a sigh of relief.
And then Rakhee and Gyan had to back out!
The adventure was On!!
We were back to fine tuning our trip with day wise plans, one final briefing by Ulhas that included handing over the Travel Folders, and we were all set to go!
