There and Back Again A journey to India with a short stop on the way in England. The trip to India is for a combination of spiritual pursuits and volunteer medical work

After our afternoon rest in Newark we took care of the check in to our flight to London online. This makes it so much easier and faster at the airport, I highly recommend doing this. We then took the hotel shuttle back to the airport and took the 20 minute train ride into New York City. Next, our navigation of the subway system was hot noisy and much longer than it should have been. Neither of us care for New York’s system. It is very poorly marked and in poor condition. It is much easier to take a cab. None-the less we spent an hour getting hot and sweaty to arrive a few blocks away from our dinner engagement. Tao is a fantastic place to eat (the address is on the itinerary page). I encourage you to check out their web site as it gives an excellent description and has some good photos. The food is superb and the ambiance would be serene if it weren’t for the euro-disco type music. It was once, long ago, a stable and in many of the grottos left in the brick walls there are now statues of Buddha. At one end of the restaurant is a huge statue of Buddha and at the other end is a wall sculpture that gives the impression of looking down on a Japanese rock garden. We enjoyed every minute there. Even a trip to the men’s room was notable as the urinal was basically a waterfall and the sink basin was like a rock filled stream. I don’t usually have comments about the toilets, but there you are. When desert arrived I had the wonderful surprise of Happy Birthday written in chocolate on the plate, even though it was still 8 days away, and a message that my sister had called with the well wishes and was picking up the tab! What a great desert topping! After dinner we walked to the Marque theatre, which took about 30 minutes and helped burn off some of the calories we had gained at Tao. We arrived with about 10 minutes to spare and then settled in to watch a thoroughly entertaining but senseless musical, The Drowsy Chaperone. The performance was excellent and light-hearted. We both laughed a great deal. After the show we took a 5 minute cab ride back to the train station for the same expense in dollars but not in effort as our earlier subway trip, went in and within five minutes we were back on the train to Newark. After repacking our bags to redistribute the weight, we got in bed in time to get a good six hours sleep before we got up at 5am to take the 5:30 shuttle to the airport. The shuttle driver, without request, broke the rules and took us to the regular terminal drop-off instead of the one the hotel’s are supposed to use which would have required us to get our bags onto the airport train system and travel around the circuit half the distance to our terminal. Having saved us a great deal of time and effort, you can be sure he got a very good tip. The rest of check in was complicated by the fact that the first thing they did after the ID check was to weigh our carry on bags. It turns out that they had to be under 6 kg! I have never had my carry on weighed before. Dee’s was 9 and mine was 13. We then took up space at the bag drop off area redistributing weight from carry on to checked bags. That is into Dee’s since her’s were the only one’s under weight. It worked out but was a bit different. All for now.