At last, I have managed to squeeze some time to write about yet another long drive I had in the Civic over the long Independence Day weekend. Ever since I bought the car, I have been doing atleast one long drive every month in it and still, the excitement have not waned off even a wee bit. After driving down to Trichy once and Yelagiri twice over the past two months, it was decided that both myself and the Civic needed a bigger and a longer drive this time.
And so, it was Coorg, one amongst the many beautiful places that Karnataka has on offer. Mind you, this was a real test for the car as it carried not three, not four, but a full load of five guys and all our luggage. I have to admit that the car came out of this acid test in flying colors.
As usual, the trip started with me scraping the bottom on the same speed-breaker (I scraped the same hump during both of my earlier drives to Yelagiri) at the Sriperumbudur Toll Plaza just after Hyundai factory. Though this acted as an initial dampener, it made sure that henceforth all of us who took the wheel drove so carefully in every speed-breaker or pothole throughout the trip. And bingo, the Civic never scraped its bottom even in a single place after that. Not even in the pothole ridden road from Periyapatna to Siddapura near Coorg.
We started from Chennai at around 4 PM on Friday evening, reached Bangalore by around 9PM after stopping for dinner at Hosur. NICE Road made sure that Bangalore was crossed in a jiffy. The Bangalore-Mysore Highway held a few surprises in the form of sudden unmarked speed-breakers. Luckily for us, they were small-sized multiple humps and the car was equipped with ABS. So, the Civic escaped with just a sequence of bad jolts. I can't even imagine what would have happened if those were big single humps. The front bumper and the rocker panels would have flew out of the car in impact. After these scares, the night was spent at a hotel in Mandya and the drive resumed next morning at 5:30 AM.
The road from Mandya till Mysore was again fantastic. This time, we were more careful and could identify speed-breakers well in advance. The ORR in Mysore was horrible and really slowed down the progress. After Mysore, the road till Periyapatna via Hunsur was excellent. The last part after Hunsur was so scenic and really made our day. From Periyapatna, we took a detour from the Mysore-Madikeri Road to reach Siddapura. I could feel the car crying out loud to me for making it to go off-roading. In most places, we were just doing speeds of about 20 km/hr. Finally, after some really careful driving over crater-sized potholes, we reached our homestay at around 9 AM.
After that, it was three full days of bliss in a pristine natural environment surrounded by the chirping of birds and the swaying of trees. The return journey was highly unremarkable thanks to our decision of going from Siddapura to Kushalnagar and return back in Madikeri-Mysore road. The roads from Kushalnagar all the way to Chennai were truly awesome.
With heavy eyes calling for sleep, I am just loading a couple of teaser pics of the trip. More to come tomorrow!
I really missed out on this very important update. After pondering around so much on where to stick it, I finally zeroed in on this place in the boot. There it is the LCLC sticker announcing to the world that I am yet another happy BHPian. I really wanted to have this in my car before the drive to Coorg and so did it on the night before the trip.