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:

NORTH CAROLINA: RALEIGH

 October 2022

On my last day I had several hours to kill after my son went to work and before I had to head to the airport, so I decided to take a look at North Carolina's capital city, Raleigh, named after Sir Walter Raleigh of Roanoke Colony fame. With a population of about 475,000, it is the 41st largest city in the United States, the 2nd most populous city in North Carolina after Charlotte, and one of the fastest growing cities in the country. In 2011 was ranked by Time as the third most-educated city in the US. 

Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the US, was born here in 1808. Other notables include Olympic figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi, American Idol star Clay Aiken, and writer David Sedaris.

I was headed for the capitol building, but I detoured when I saw Christ Episcopal Church, built in 1848 to 1853. I love this sculpture entitled Peaceable Francis.

Down the street and around the corner is the First Baptist Church, completed in 1859.

INDONESIA: BACKGROUND AND FLIGHT TO SINGAPORE

 June-July 2023

When he was a young boy going to the zoo on a regular basis, my husband Bob was intrigued by the place names "Sumatra," "Borneo," and "Indonesia" on the cages of many of the monkeys, the orangutans, and the Komodo dragons.  He dreamed of going to those exotic places some day and seeing some of his favorite zoo animals in the wild.

About five years ago, he started to think it might be time to make his dreams come true and started to plan a trip to Indonesia. That trip was in place and we were ready to go in June 2020. However, when the world shut down in March 2020 at the start of the Covid epidemic, all of Bob's planning and almost all the advance payments we made for the trip went down the tubes.

The map of Indonesia below shows that the country was widely affected by the disease. Of a population of 277 million (compared to the US population of 332 million), about 6.8 million got Covid (compared to 103.8 million in the US) and 160,941 died (compared to 1.1 million in the US). About 75% got at least one dose of the vaccine (compared to about 82% in the US). The Indonesian numbers of infections and death seem very low, but apparently there were significant issues with reporting. Some research claims that the "official" numbers may reflect only 2% of the real COVID-19 infections in Indonesia.

Anyway, Indonesia, like most countries, closed its borders to non-essential travel on April 2, 2020. The country remained essentially closed to tourism until late-2022.

Bob started looking into rebooking our trip in November 2022 when he reached out to Adventure Indonesia, the tour company he had worked with to plan the aborted trip. He was pleasantly surprised to find they would honor some of the money we had already poured into the trip. We were lucky to get a refund from Singapore Airlines for the round-trip flight from LAX, but we lost the money we had spent on all the inter-island flights we had booked. Adventure Indonesia honored pretty much everything else--ground and water transportation, guides, food and hotels that were part of the package, etc. We were so relieved that the money we had spent was not a total loss.