There's No Place Like Home

Sometimes it’s not as easy as clicking your heels together to get back home. And even if it was, I don’t think I’d wear those glittery, red shoes that make it happen.

T and I were at “our apartment” in Thailand where we’d been living for a couple weeks while we waited on our passports and visas to come back. They’d arrived on Monday, so we emailed our travel agent that afternoon and asked him to book tickets for us to head to India. He said he’d do it.

Tuesday afternoon Travis emailed him again asking for an update on when we might be leaving, and we got a response a few minutes later. It was short and read something like this “Ticket information is on the way. You leave today!!”

It was 1:30 pm. I was thinking maybe a 5 or 6 pm flight. Nope. An email came a few minutes later – our flight was leaving at 2:55! We just started grabbing things as quickly as possible, stuffing it in our bags. I even had wet clothes that had just come out of the washing machine that I had to stuff in plastic bags so that we could get out as quickly as possible. Within 15 minutes we had packed our stuff, so we grabbed our bags and headed to the street to find a taxi. We got in a tuk-tuk that took us on the 20 minute ride to the airport, but I’m pretty sure he sensed the urgency because we made it there a little faster than I would have expected. Along the way I was making calls to friends, asking them to get out apartment keys to the right people and letting them know we were leaving in a rush.

At the airport we quickly made it through check-in and security before realizing that yes, we were on our way to India, but we didn’t have a place to stay when we arrived in Delhi. Using the last of my Thai coins, I got on a public computer and sent a facebook message to a friend there asking if we could spend the night with them. And then we got on the plane. All within an hour and a half.

After a layover and a rather uneventful trip through immigrations and customs we finally made it to Delhi where we headed over too my friend’s house. We spent two nights there (and were able to dry the clothes we’d washed in Thailand)before leaving early Thursday morning on the train to come home. I called my good friend who is a taxi driver to pick us up that afternoon, and he said he’d be there “big smile ke sat (with a big smile)” And sure enough he was, big smile and all. There’s no place like home.

-एरिक