D-Day 1

March 7th, 2008 - The D-Day finally arrived and as was expected there was a last minute rush to confirm who the hell is coming with whom and whose car. So this is how it turned out, Rahul, Karan, Elvis, Tanveer and Kris came along in Kris's car. Amit S, Hemu and Dinesh came along in Hemu's car. Priyank and I got in my car. Javed, Amit K and Parag came on their own, Javed did not arrive until the afternoon of March 8th. Phew!! This is the first time 13 HKs (HK is aka HaraamKhors) gathered to celebrate the SJ-QBR and as you can guess it was quite a riot when we reached the spot.



The entourage (Kris and my car) started from Vashi and we made the first stop at a R & B in Belapur, Mahesh Lunch Home around 10:00 PM. Now all through the trip from Vashi to Belapur I have been telling the guys this place is cheap and not the expensive MLH they think it is, they didnt believe me until they saw the signboard. Well double whammy for the guys coz there was Wine Shop just adjacent to the R & B. We thought, to make this pit-stop was the best thing to do since there was no gurantee what F & B Lonavala had in store for us in the dead of the night

The pit-stop at MLH was the beginning of what was going to be a laugh riot for the next couple of days. While we were busy ordering F & B, we overheard someone at another table saying "HE HAS COME THE HARD WAY" and that phrase just got stuck with all of us and every now and then we would use it when mentioning someone in our gang. Ironically, we did come up the hard way, 5 years back (March 15, 2003) we use to bundle ourselves in a couple of cars and head to the cheapest gateway available in town and today, believe it or not, we had 6 different cars for 13 folks and our spending pattern, less said the better, dont want some IT guy to read to this :)

Hemu, Dinesh, Amit S and Amit K arrived an hour later at the R & B. Now since Hemu has been acting pricey lately, we decided to give him a cold shoulder when he arrived but eventually had to kiss and make up. One man that was under the line of fire from the word go was Kris, he got quite an earful from Dinesh, for ignoring him and acting like what we term as "CEO HK". We all had fun at his expense. It was time to leave. Time 12:45 AM

Moment of Truth, we hit the Mumbai Expressway and I was pretty impressed with my driving skills, I reached the first Food Court point in 20 Mins. Not until I hit the ghats and I kept sliding down in peak traffic, thats when I realized I still have a long way to go. Well, we all touched at the base around 2:15 AM. Over to D-Day 2