A month ago. Saturday evening. Calls at 7.30 pm. 5 friends arrive at 9 pm. We take out the Karnataka map and decide where to go.

I suggested that we plan such that we can go to Shivagange for the sunrise and that we should take the shortest route out of Bangalore so that we can avoid the traffic as much as possible, and left the rest to the others. Since we were close to Mysore road, we reached a consensus within 2 minutes to take Mysore road → Srirangapatanam → Pandavapura → Nagamangala → Yediyur → Kunigal → Nelamangala → Shivagange → Back home. Roads : Mysore Road, Road connecting Mysore road to NH-48 , NH-48, NH-4.

On the way on Mysore Road, I suggested we skip “kaaDu mane” restaurant because we’ve been there often, and one of us was insisting on a dhaba. We kept saying we’ll stop for the next one, and kept skipping dhabas. Discussion topics varied from pulling legs to politics to amazing lecturers like for example, an Electronics lecturer said that high-strength signals are sent towards a satellite and low-strength signals come towards earth. Why? Because of gravity! True story. We finally went to Kamat Lokaruchi and had amazing joLada roti oota.

I was singing “Hit the road, Jack” and we were back on the highway.

We were taking turns in driving the car. I drove for half an hour at around 12.30 am. We stopped at a place to have some tea and then we asked the people there about the road to Pandavapura and they said we had to take the right turn i.e. the road just opposite the tea stall! If we hadn’t stopped here, we would’ve been going on and missed this. What an amazing coincidence! The tea burnt my tongue but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Our journey continued and I got into stargazing – my favorite pastime during night drives. Sometimes when you are watching a star continuously, you suddenly realize that the earth is revolving and moving, we’re not just stationary, that sudden realization gives a gushing feeling, it startles me everytime and yet there’s something surreal about it. And it feels stupid to even try to explain this to somebody else.

At around 1.30 am, the road was secluded and very few vehicles around. We switched off the headlights momentarily to see how dark it really is and it was amazin’. The two photographer geeks got started clicking. One of us notices a light near one of the trees at the edge of our horizon, and another said it must be some hut. A few minutes later, one of us shouts it’s the moon! This is the first time ever that I have saw a “moonrise”. We were just jumping up and down at this point. Totally unexpected. Exactly the stuff night drives are made of.