The Hampi Diaries - Day 1

 October 10, 2021

So after a lot of to and fro and discussing dates and possibilities (something that's been on the cards since April 2020 when the lockdown was in force) we decided to make a trip to Hampi. All three of us agreed and it was Anjali who finally signed the tee off and we leapt at the opportunity. It's been ages since we've had a vacation - even a small one (not considering the lockdown as a vacation certainly).

The general landscape along the way

The idea was to leave on Sunday so Shobhs checked out the hotels and found that most were booked on Sunday. She zeroed in on Hyatt Place at Vidyanagar. Now that place made sense for a couple of days for a couple of reasons - I had spent 10 days on the campus a stone's throw from the Hyatt attending a writer's retreat in 2019, Shobhs had spent a night while on an all-women rally from Hyderabad to Goa and only Anjali hadn't been there (and she needed reliable wifi to atttend a few classes). So Hyatt is was and off we went in the Ertiga which was making its biggest trip yet since it arrived in February this year. Never too late.

The Place

So we set off at 645 pm and set the GPS to Hyatt Place, Vidyanagar. It showed 7 and a half hours. The route was Kurnool and then off to Bellary and so on. The highway till Kurnool was a dream as always and then the road was bad (really bad in some patches) but we finally made it in the prescribed time and checked into the Hyatt.

A nice looking tree at the entrance

 Apart from the snacks we stopped at a roadside idli, vada, dosa guy and ate some stuff.

Waiting for some Italian lunch

I've see the Hyatt everyday on my trip before so it was nothing new but I found out that it was a pet friendly place and there were quite a few pets around. I showed the campus off to Shobhs and Anjali, we ate some pizza at Dominos and strolled about in the evening before settling down after a good, hard day.

More on this tomorrow.