Concord Ahoy...



(...continued from 'The Eagles have landed...' )
The dash from the LA Terminal 1 to Terminal 14 , and the infuriating care-a-damn of UA notwithstanding, we boarded the UA flight to San Francisco (SFO). In the flight, I met a friendly gora gentleman (he was a medical techno intern, if you get what I mean) living in the Bay Area, and spent some time chatting him up. He had come to India to to attend a college friend's marriage. From him, I did get some starter pointers like that of Craigs list. We were quite full of the long journey, and wanted a place to rest ourselves asap. Except for an hour at Frankfurt, we never had much of a chance to freshen up... We wished we were already at the Residence Inn, where we were to be put up. And the progress of the last part of the journey LA onwards, seemed like a tiring eternity. It was like the colloquial Indian saying "Hathi gaya, poonch nahi jaati..." ... Or may be it was a crooked application of the Pareto's principle... :-) ...

The LA-SFO journey is nearly equivalent to the Mumbai-Blr journey in terms of time. Distance wise, it may be a 100 kms lesser, as we were to learn later during our stay.

Finally, we landed at SFO. And we had a Jordanian taxi driver to take us to Concord. He had expressed reservations helping us with the baggage. He siad he had back problems, which I had too unfortunately. But nevertheless, I agreed, as I wanted to get over this last stretch of the journey now... So off we went... And tired as we were, to our chagrin, the taxi driver was very very loquacious... He rambled on about how we should live in our country of birth itself... and how happy he would be to go back in a few years etc... We were to meet a few more people from around the world, who were to express the same thing... I concluded that this must be some sort of a necessary evil.. Coming to US for just under a lifetime... :-) ...
After an hour in the taxi, we reached Residence Inn at Pleasant Hill (near Concord)... The ride cost me about $130 (apart from the unrequested verbosity) probably because it was night time. And then I had to lug the luggage again all the way to my room. And finally after nearly 36 hours, we had the luxury of a bed to rest our weary bodies on. But before that, I had to make a phone call... A call back to India to convey that we had indeed reached our destination in US in single piece, and things were fine... But due to unavailability of a calling card at night, we had to work around the issue, use a call center toll free number to reach Mugdha's BIL (Sugandh Jijaji), and convey back to India about our well-being.

And then we rested for a while, until the next day, or night, or whatever it was considering the jet and time lag... :-) ...

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