First Drive

This post is a long pending one. 2 more drives have been completed before the post :D.
Mid June, Asko and I decided to get some driving practice(read learn). We decided to drive to Mysore. The timing was critical since our next plan was Chennai and we didn't want to go slower than the trains.

We started from home at around 10 AM on a fine sunday morning. We got delayed because we thought 9 AM was too late to start. It was my turn first. I took it slow and didn't want to get the car scratched (I guess in highways you don't get to scratch :P). The speed was amazing, 90 minutes into the drive and we were 50 KM from home. Thats when Asko decided, enough is enough. At this rate we would complete the round trip only by midnight. He took to the wheels and then went berserk. We were cruising at around 90k. The lost time was being recovered. The scenery around was pretty much okay. We didn't try too many stunts, we had to respect our first highway drive. People driving in the Highways seemed much sensible than the ones back in the city. I meant, people are in complete senses when driving on a highway, may be the traffic jams are the catalysts contributing to the city driving characteristics. Or may be people know that highways typically don't give you a second chance ;). Either way, except for one or two pesky drivers, the others were decent.

The only problem was that we had to cut through 3-4 towns and they had some mountains built on roads. The road sign said speed breaker but they were huge and didn't look like one. This was dampening our already battered avg speed. Time to switch driving seats again. Taking cue from Asko, i decided to keep up the pace and we were heading in decent avg speed. After one more round of driver switching we reached mysore in just 4 hrs (:-O). Thats 40K average. This was an insult to the capability(and capacity) of the car. But we were not too perturbed by the stats (we had no choice). After getting lost in the Mysore Town (was it a city?), we reached our destination. The good part was that we didn't have any pitstops for input/output. This saves a lot of time.

It was time to return back home. We started around 6 PM (add a few more mins) and were determined to break the 4 hr record (record!! :-?). The start was pretty good and we were lapping the Ks in no time. Alas, we didn't know about the damned traffic on the Mysore-Bangalore highways every weekend :(. It was jam packed and we were crawling. At one point of time, it took us 30 mins to cover 3K. Thats when we stopped chasing the 4 hr target and decided that fate was against us. The Jam ended after we crossed the bottle neck bridge (some construction was going on). We were back to our highway speeds again. It was dark and we dropped atleast 20K speed. We were surprised to enter the city limits in less than 3.5 hrs. We decided to chill and took a pitstop. By the time we reached home, it was 10+. Hmmm, 4 hrs again. Big deal. Good night!

oh, did somebody say that max speed of a car in the first month should be maintained below 50k ? We thought it was Avg 50k.

First Drive: 14th June, 2009
Destination: Mysore
Distance: To 160+ KM/ Fro 160+ KM
Time : ~4 hr / ~4 hr

[Started this post on 15th June, but completed & published in sept.]