Disneyland alas!

San Francisco Trip

San Francisco

Preparing to take the US plunge!

The travel to USA for us was to take shape with a lot of efforts at every stage. The initial effort was to get hold of the passports, which was a process that took almost four to five months.

By early February, I had applied for the NOC for passport and before I left for Delhi, had handed over all the papers to Mr Naidu to purue our passport application. Since this did not take off, the application was resend in the month of May and with a fresh NOC, I filed online for the passport for the balance three of us. By May/Jun the interview was over and the papers were cleared by Jul/Aug. From thereon, the application for Visa took less than a month to be approved from IHQ and even lesser for an appointment at the Consulate and the final approval to get through. By September end, we had finished our flight booking and on the 11^th of October, we were off to the CST airport at Mumbai to board our flight to the USA.

The preparations weren’t too elaborate. The only thing that we consciously had emphasized on was travel preparations to cater for the long haul between the two cities, which were to keep us afloat for a whopping 30 hours, with over two dozen countries to cover. Warm clothing and adequate change for kids were the priority areas. There was no room to carry food as that would be an outright reject at the security gates. Still we managed to carry some desi chappatis for the just in case scenario that may arise during the long voyage.

The ride from Gomati to the airport having been done in a cumbersome one tonner Swaraj Mazda from about 2145 to 2240h on 11 Oct, the balance portion of the ten thousand mile journey was as smooth as a ride through the Autobahn. Our first ever check into the international terminal was pretty easy and fast and would have taken the bare minimum time for every process, since there was hardly a queue at any point. We went through the emigration/checkin/security processes one after the other with almost no hassle at all even with the kids around. Once we entered the waiting hall for the flight, we had another about an hour to go before boarding the flight.

The flight was pretty much as we expected. Large and spacious, the seats, however, were almost as cramped up as that of the domestic flights in India. With not so long legs, the four of us had not really any great discomfort at that though.

There were some seats unoccupied though. The meals were fresh and steaming and since our little ones were hardly awake, we quietly slid their food into our carry bag so that the Munich stopover would be looked after without having to spend our scarce Dollars.

We reached Munich at the designated time, about 0600h local time. Our first of the few steps in Germany were towards the waiting area at the airport and since we had no transit Visa, our area was limited to the Terminal 2 of the airport which was itself as spacious as a mall. There was enough to see around though we had to wait till 0830h for the shops to lift their shutters and to see people in action. A complete walk around of the terminal and the shops and worship centre took almost an hour and half and once we returned, we settled into the ‘H’ counter. What was apparent was the almost complete presence of the Lufthansa flights in the airport. They were there almost every where, and the few exceptions that we saw were the American Airlines, Portugual Airlines and UPS.

The first signs of our flight came up only by about 1345h and it was a pleasure to see the large A340/600 move in to take the place where it had to be boarded by a large number of passengers, we including. The counter was almost full, and as I had noticed while booking the flight online, there were almost nil seats that were left unoccupied.

This one was larger and as packed as any A340 could be. The flight took off and the kids got into the ‘Cartoon’ mode with the inflight entertainment system being made good use of. This was to be a long non stop flight with almost 11 hours of airborne time. Things went off quite well with the kids having had a good lunch and going off to a deep slumber without much of a persuasion required from either of us. I myself saw through a movie in full, the Prince of Persia! A bit of a stroll through the length of the aircraft did get the better of my muscles. It was almost after the half way mark that an unexpected announcement came about a passenger having fallen sick and which required our aircraft to be turned back to Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. We had almost reached halfway through Greenland and this would mean an additional journey of about an hour plus on one side. I wished that we could touch down this city before the sunset, but that was not to happen and the landing happened in the dark hours. We still did get a glimpse of the capital city and that was not any bad news for a family which had set out to visit only one foreign country. This having been done, there was a further delay of about half an hour to evacuate the passenger and thereafter to refuel the flight.

The flight did take off and head for our destination, and as the aircraft crossed the time zones and moved further to the West, we inched towards Los Angeles by about 2200h. The landing was smooth and though we had to wait at the runway to move into our designated space, the clearance process once we exited the plane was as smooth as ever. The emigration line was specially shortened for us, probably because we had the advantage of travelling with little kids. We were ushered into the Residents/US Citizens line and without much of a wait, we reached the official who cleared our visit into the country without many questions. They took our fingerprints and asked about what we planned to do in the country.

Once we reached the exit point, ABC was waiting for us and we headed towards the exit with a big smile across all our faces. The first walk to the car park was quite intriguing as we crossed the roads so orderly, and when the cars came to a halt as we progressed to the other side of the road..quite different, we felt! From then on, till today, as we are still in the holiday mood at the US, probably the pictures speak a better language than the words..