Christmas holiday in Tamil Nadu

What a difference a day makes! Our ride and Tamil Nadu quickly cheered us up; India has a way of turning a frown into a smile in the most unexpected ways.

Maybe it was the holiday weekend or maybe it was us being a bit more relaxed and cheerful ourselves, but suddenly everyone we met on the road seemed extra enthusiastic, waving, smiling, cheering.

About halfway through our ride, another cyclist rode up to us and invited us to join his cycling club across the street. Remember yesterday I said we haven’t met a single other Indian cyclist in over 2 months? Well today we met 20! Here are just a few; we exchanged contact info, and I asked them to email me some of the photos taken!

An amazing 20 minutes ensued with people handing us oranges, parking our bikes with theirs, and taking a million selfies, and even a video interview. We shook hands with everyone, and really enjoyed meeting them. They are cycling from their home in Madurai to Kanyakumari in one day, then taking the train home. It is taking us 3 days to do that 250km ride in reverse. Quite an impressive ride! Good luck guys!!

The rest of the highway riding was fairly monotonous, but we passed through some picturesque rice paddy fields, and Steve kept the mood light singing Christmas songs and taking turns with me blocking the headwinds.

Half of the day was actually riding on service roads, which have no traffic and access to local shops and whatnot, so it was a very stress-free day of cycling, if not a bit boring. Even some of the service roads had service roads! But many of those were being used by local farmers to dry and separate their grains, so it was a bumpy ride if we tried to use them.

Still, there were many interesting monuments and temples along the way.

Last night I scoured all the online booking apps and found one hotel that was over our budget but within cycling distance at 107km. Not wanting to risk getting stuck, we booked it. We also booked a hotel in Madurai; I had posted on a TripAdvisor forum along for Christmas things to do in Madurai and someone responded with a Christmas gala at one hotel. They still had vacancy, so we booked a room, which includes admission to the gala dinner. I hope our business casual dress is sufficient for their dress code!

We will update soon on our Christmas events, and we again wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!