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:

GERMANY: DRESDEN

 Sunday, May 18, 2025

We were up at 7:00 AM, ate breakfast in our hotel at 8:00, and left at 8:45 to catch a 9:00 church service.

Except . . . I failed as navigator and took us to the wrong church. Somehow we ended up at Christ Church, a Lutheran church whose claim to fame is that it is Dresden's only remaining church with two steeples and was the first Art Nouveau church in Germany. It was built in 1903-1905 and was badly damaged by bombs during the bombing in February 1945 that destroyed much of the city. (More on the bombing in a minute.) It was repaired enough to make it usuable in 1950-1951 and thoroughly restored in 1973-1980.

We walked all around the church searching for an unlocked door, but we didn't find one. We did discover this beautiful sculpture of Christ with a lovely green patina. It made it worth the stop.

We finally found the church we had been looking for, the Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady. 

The church was destroyed during the infamous February 1945 firebombing of Dresden, a joint RAF and USAF operation that included four attacks over three days, destroying more than 1,600 acres of the city's center and killing approximately 25,000 people. This bombing preceded the bombing of my mother's hometown of Pforzheim by ten days, and she would often weep on the anniversary of this event as well as on the anniversary of the bombing of Pforzheim.

Dresden after the bombing. From Wikipedia.

A bronze plaque in the square shares this memory from Church Inspector Weinert (translated here from the German): "On Thursday, February 15th, around 11 a.m., as I was entering the dead city, searching for the cathedral dome in the milky fog, I was shocked to see nothing. An hour earlier, my wife, searching for me, had witnessed this tragedy: after an initial, quiet crackling, the dome slowly collapsed, and then, with a tremendous bang, the outer walls of the church burst, and a pitch-black cloud of dust filled the entire area."

View from City Hall after the bombing.