RRR’s Road trip – reaching Kolhapur – chapter 2

Often when I am asked “Ab kahan ka plan h ?” or ” Bhilai m ho ki bahar ho?” I actually felt embarrassed but recently I read a caption which made me realize if that is my reputation so be it 🙂

Continuing from my last post… about four us travelling by our car to Konkan.

https://musings-of-a-fiftyplus.com/2024/09/29/road-trip-tales-from-the-western-ghats/

Road trips are really time to chew on life and its priceless blessings..

Given a stop how long will we relish the beauty of the vast sky standing in hot sun? Do we really see the clear blue sky, big pure white fluffy clouds, or the sky meeting the greenery?

We reached Shirdi by 6 pm, after travelling at 120 km/hr on Samruddhi Expressway – a novel experience 🙂 for me, like I said in part-1, I have only travelled at 40-45 km/hr !!! Our stay at Shirdi is at Hotel Sai Palki Niwara .. with its own bird zoo with lots of stone sculptures on display. It has a soothing atmosphere with its lavish corridors, calm outdoors unlike any other place of stays for religious cities. Thanks to PBR and RBR for finding the place. After our Shirdi Sai Baba darshan, and breakfast, we resumed our road trip. Today we were set to travel to Kolhapur. a distance of nearly 400 km.

We stopped for tea and snacks after crossing Ahmednagar and another stop on this road was a sunflower field near a village called Supe … This was a picturesque location and we were thrilled to have stopped.

RR and PBR have a friend Nitin Supe hence we gladly called him about our location/discovery, if he has a history associated with the place. This was a small state highway and RBR was not happy for having come onto this road but I was very happy for I could see the life here.. unlike Highways were you can travel at 100 km/hr. Sharing two videos here …

Another stop again was for tea and this was a beautiful small village cafe which promised “Chulhe-varcha-Jhewan” that is common phrase in Marathi, we saw on most hoardings for hotels, meaning “meal prepared on fireplace”. It has an authentic flavor, being cooked slowly on the burning wood/coal. I wanted to taste it but we were on “no-heavy-meal-journey ” so we just had tea. While we sat waiting for the tea, talking to the young owner, who said half of his cafe was blown off in the recent heavy rains and his father expired six months back, his struggle was visible … he asked us to stop again, have meal while returning from Kolhapur. I am keeping my fingers crossed to visit the place again. 🙂 I wish!

Have a look at the place with the windmills and the crops growing in the black soil … (the video quality is not upto the mark to show the beauty) I love the windmills…

Meandering through the state highway, which was terrible at places, we finally reached Kolhapur by late evening. A friend suggested Hotel Mahalaxmi Executive as our night halt, and we could locate the place (thanks to Google maps) and took two rooms(we had called ahead and transferred an advance amount). PBR was very sure he was going to visit the Mahalaxmi Temple same evening. He narrated how during the last trip to the area, he couldn’t go for the darshan at the temple and had some bad experience later… so jhat-pat they freshened and went off to the temple. Two of us went on to find our dinner place and asked the couple to join us later. We had a wonderful veg thali and returned to our abode for the day… totally ignorant of the place we were at.

Will share about this wonderful place…

To be continued..