What is more pleasing than wine and cheese. For the young 20 year
olds, cheese makes sense but wine is well blech! That did not stop us from
going all the way to Sula Vineyards in Nashik. For a random weekend we decided
to go over to Nashik and see how wines are made. This started off as four
people plan and a normal car would have been enough. But when the plan got out,
we ended up with 9 people in all. A quails was booked, a friend flew over from
Delhi so that he wouldn’t miss the trip and we all decided we were getting
ourselves some wine and fancy cheese.
We left Mumbai around 7 am and raced down to Nashik which is
180 km away. We had classic road trip were one friend went berserk and
started singing at top of her voice. It didn’t help that she knows all the lyrics, including Honey
Singh Raps! Life in those 3 hours brought back the carefree idiocy we all lived
by. Slowly everyone loosened up.
What we didn’t realize was that it doesn’t take an entire
day to just sip wine and that we missed few steps in planning this out. Sure we
enjoyed that, played few games and forgot that it wasn’t a club. The pictures
came out great.
Food! Sula had some expensive food and a student’s
pocket couldn’t afford it. Local enquiry told us that there was another
vineyard around Soma that had excellent food. We drove there. There were
sprinklers on in the garden and naturally we went in. Ran around the park like
bunch of kids and got all wet. We provided lovely picture to few
foreigners and were lucky to not be thrown out. We left the place in less than
15 minutes and in retrospect, that was awesome time. The food was way more
expensive and we bowed out!
Next we headed over to a pond which was
slimy
but we paddled into the water, took few pics, scarred people around and came
back.
What happened next was amazing. We sat down on the bank of
the lake and talked about if we had some football or something. Out came
handkerchiefs and in went some stones to make an indigenous ball. We played
catch for some time. In that moment, clothes dried off, laughs came easily and
we all forgot the worries and troubles that haunted us all.
The simplicity of
it was astounding; all we needed was a break!
Next stop was a local dhabba (Akshya Dhaba, do
check it out!). 9 monsters ate like pigs, had 25 cups of tea and brought an awesome
day to end. The happiest part was the bill came to 1400/- which made us all
smile just a little more. Singing the good old Antakshari, we closed a pretty
awesome trip! The students and professionals all came together as group of
reckless friends who just wanted to enjoy. And that is my juju, my motivation
and my optimism.
