INDIA 2025: FROM LOS ANGELES TO AMRITSAR

 November 20-22, 2025

In December 2024, Bob and I and my sister Chris and her husband Stan had a wonderful trip to India that included time spent in Guwahati, Kaziranga National Park, Delhi, Varanasi, Agra, and Jaipur. We checked many things off our bucket list, but one remained: to see a tiger in the wild. In spite of five or six safari drives in Kaziranga National Park, the big cat escaped us.

Foreseeing this as a possibility, Bob had purchased a five-year, multiple-entry visa instead of a 30-day, single-entry visa. I think his plan (unbenownst to me) was always to go back and try again. I think it may have been on the flight home that he suggested another trip.

We reached out to our reliable travel partners from the first trip and also included my brother Dave and his wife Bonnie and proposed traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday when I had a full week off from school and could add a few extra days. Both couples enthusiastically agreed, and Bob started planning.

Dave and Bonnie left three days before we did so that they could squeeze in some of the experiences, like the Taj Mahal, that we had on our first India trip. The plan was to meet up in the Delhi Airport on November 22 and fly from there to our first location: Amritsar.

With a time change of 12.5 hours, it takes two-and-a-half calendar days to get to Delhi from our home. We left the house on Thursday morning, drove the two hours to the Los Angeles Airport, left our car in the LA Hilton underground parking lot, and boarded a Virgin Atlantic flight to London at about 3:40 p.m.

A good omen?

The flight was 10 hours and 20 minutes long, and we arrived in London on a beautiful day with blue skies and a great view of the Thames curlicuing its way through the city.

We could even see the London Eye on the South Bank:

ENGLAND: A SHORT VISIT TO CAMBRIDGE ON OUR WAY TO SOUTH AFRICA

In May and June, we took a trip to five countries in Southern Africa. Our journey began with two very long flights: a 10 hour 35 minute flight from Los Angeles to London, and an 11 hour 30 minute flight from London to Cape Town, separated by a layover of 11 hours 20 minutes. All told, if you include the two hour drive to LAX and the three hours in the airport before take-off (we always leave early because LA traffic is so unpredictable), we were on the road for 37 hours 25 minutes.

And we hit the ground running.

This is what our trip looked like on a map. First, our flight to Cape Town via London:

And then, from South Africa to Namibia to Botswana to Zimbabwe to Zambia and back to South Africa for our flight home:

 AND we did it all with a 24" duffel bag and a backpack each.

But before we started the African journey, we had that 11+ hour layover in London. We are not good sitters, especially if it is sitting in between two flights that are themselves each 10+ hours of sitting. If we have a long layover, we opt for an excursion away from the airport. (See our seven-hour layover in Hong Kong, for example.) There seemed to be plenty of time on this trip for a side trip to Cambridge, and since I have a niece who lives in London who was willing to meet us at Heathrow and join our adventure, we got ourselves a rental car and headed north to Cambridge, a distance of about 50 or 60 miles. Unfortunately, our plane had come in about an hour late and we had spent forever in a customs line (14 rows in the turning ropes), so we didn't have quite as much time as we had planned for, but it was still more than adequate.