Continued...Hum hai raahi pyar ke...

We had one kind of great confusion [or comedy of errors?] to find our camp ground. Every one of us just half a mile away from the camp ground and was struggling to locate the place. I can not forget that muddy road, near the garbage pit which we thought was our camp ground!! In fact we went ahead and drove to the dead end to find nothing but a barren land! Later drove back to find all others on their way to that very same place! It was no body’s fault, GPS was directing everyone to that garbage pit :) Out of 5 cars, and except for one every one gathered there and collectively started looking for our actual ground! At least after taking couple of U-turns, actually by following some other's car we figured out that tiny way to our camping site :) we all again went in line one after another to our final destination! Meanwhile the car missing was located, looks like they drove around the same place for 3 times! But could not figure out this road which was taking us to the actual camp ground! Finally we all 16 of us reached the ground, unloaded our heavy luggage from everyone’s car! Though we had 3 tents, but had booked 5 grounds, you see we need camp ground for our cars also! They were also camping with us in the open ground and under the sky! [The restriction was that one car/camp ground and we had 5 of them!]

All guys started putting up the tents at 3 camp grounds and we all girls started fixing the dinner! :P We had loads of food, main course had roti, daal-makhni, Khaju katli and sohan papadi was there for desert along with lemon rice, tomato rice, puliyogare and curd rice! Already darkness was invading the mountains and falling on us, air was well gelled with the coldness and we were almost shivering. Thankfully even before setting the tents, first thing we had done was to lit the campfire! The fire in the pit kept us warm and the hot food made our night indeed a fiesta in forest!

After dinner, we all moved to the next camp ground, where we lit again the camp fire and started preparing for BBQ, we had Paneer, onions, capsicum, sweet potato and potato! All of these stuck to a BBQ rod and spicy masala smeared all over was just mouth wateringly tasty! There we 16 of us sat around and preparing the BBQ, we had a guitarist who was entraining every one of us with the melodious songs. Midst of this suddenly we heard some phones ringing and yes one more couple was joining us and within no time the lovely couple was there before us!! We all, in the day time struggled to locate the place, went around couple of times before locating this place, this friend of us, drove in that dark night, new to California and after many hours of continuous travel made it to the camp ground with out getting lost anywhere!! We could not believe this :)Yes!! We were 18 of us in that night! A big crowd, as pointed out by one of our friend a team of stars, individually everyone made sure everything would go fine. Hats of to such a coordinating team!

The sky was clear, stars shining, moon smiling :) and breeze blowing the cold air took everyone to a different world I guess. We were tired enough to get a good night sleep. We all went into our respective tents and again we all 5 gals in one tent!! As soon we entered the tenets we started hearing some kind of noise and we all were scared to death thinking it’s a bear! But we realized that it’s wind blowing away the paper plates which we used for BBQ. After listening to a stories from one of our friend, 2 of other friends did not sleep for whole night! I guess one another friend and I are the only 2 slept without worrying about any bear stories J that too until early morning rays came and woke us up!

It was around 6 in the morning I guess, and sun was on our face! Just peeped out of the tent and see that snow covered mountains in their brightest white ever! The morning sun had spread all over the valley and reflections of frozen ice were all over. We all woke up, enjoyed the morning Sun and started preparing for breakfast! We made bread and omelet and tea!! Apart from this we had juice, fruit, biscuits, you name it and we had for our breakfast!! A real real king sized breakfast!

After our breakfast, we headed to the site seeing around! There we found one ski resort! [forgot the name now :(] We took a gondola ride there, went on top of the ice mountain, played in the snow as much as we want, took lots of pictures and roamed around in that snow. It was a white mountain, just snow and snow everywhere, people, kids, tourists skiing around, it was a spectacular view. We played till the lunch time and every one of us were really hungry. We headed for Mexican restauranta! And then to a Gull lake! A lake covered with beautiful snow covered mountains! Went for boating, it was a lazy afternoon, we in the mid of the lake parked it and were just basking under the Sun, talking about numerous things!

The evening was almost same as last one, except that we had little more fun, there were more songs, dances and games, with ongoing BBQ on the fire! This night every one of us slept peacefully I guess to wake up and pack to return back to our Silicon Valley! Our return too was filled with lots of fun, stopping at various vista points, posed for many pictures and bought lots of fruits (cherry, strawberries, etc) on the way from farmers markets! At around 7:00 PM on Monday evening we reached home, carrying all these sweet memories in our heart and mind forever :)

[PS: Tried to make this post as short as as possible, however still ended up this long... :D, tried to cover as much as possible, but I'm sure many more events might have already paged out of memory and not made it to this post... :)]