The Terrific3 travel blog

We rallied and got up at the early time of 520am to get to Udaipur airport and to our 830am flight to Mumbai on time. This also meant saying bye to our driver of 10 days, Jagdish. We gave him a nice tip and it was a sweet goodbye. Here is a photo of him with the kids. He was such a great presence, and so helpful, patient and loving with my kids.

We then checked into our flight to Mumbai. The baggage weight and size limits are tiny for the local Indian airlines but we have been traveling super light (despite the shopping) and I had a digital luggage scale to confirm we would be ok.

We landed in Mumbai at 950, it took about 30 min for luggage, and then the drive to our hotel on marine drive took over an hour getting us there by noon. We have an amazing room—a corner sea suite, but because it is unique, it wasn’t checked out and available for early check in so we went on the Mumbai tour at 1pm right after lunch. The switching around always seems hard for both kids, in different ways, and I think touring before settling into the hotel room was hard and they weren’t really into it.

Also, Mumbai is a big, crowded and smoggy Indian city and “touring” meant a lot of driving around in traffic, which is not our favorite thing to do. Though it is also quite gorgeous on marine drive, as we watched the sunset from our hotel room tonight and now as I watch the city lit up at night.

On our tour, we first went to see the world’s largest open air laundry, an area with so many people washing and hanging and drying and pressing laundry, a living paradox surrounded by multi million dollar condos and the growing wealth of Mumbai.

Next we went to the Mahatma Gandhi museum, and the boys learned about Gandhi for the first time.

Then to the hanging gardens.

Then to the glorious Victoria station, amazing architecture.

By now the kids were begging to go back to the hotel so my dream of eating chaat or pau bhaji for dinner had diminished…maybe tomorrow?

Kids need downtime….what can you say?

So Z and I checked out the pool and gave S some much needed space as the hotel transitions are hard for him.

Then in room dining, which was decent, and now to bed….

And btw our guide here is female, so no more complications 😉