Hectic days with a job transition coming, riding long & touring were a bit held back. I missed many rides organized by Bangalore CBR250R Riders group. It had been quite a while since I hit the open road & leaned over corners & twisted the throttle wide open. Finally the time arrived when things started settling down slowly & I was up for a ride that I was craving for!

I met my good friend of mine, Godwin Monis during our regular city breakfast meets & he showed interest in joining for the ride which I was planning to go this april. We then decided to meet at some place over the weekend & plan our next two BIG rides. We stumbled upon a crazy idea to ride to a place, camp overnight & plan our next BIG rides. We decided to ride to Shettihalli Church, Hassan on a friday night from Bangalore, camp there overnight & ride back on saturday morning. The plan sounds so simple & we started making arrangements.

What did we need?
1. A tent! I had contacted Bangalore Mountaineering Club(BMC) for checking availability of tents. "Tents are available, you can pick them up from the below address" came the reply.

2. Food - We decided to pack up minimal snacks & ride light.

3. Lights - A torch & an LED emergency light.

4. Other equipment : We carried all the stuff from standard checklist for any long rides. Swiss knife, toolkit, puncture repair kit, tire inflater.etc

It was friday morning & we were all set & geared up for camping!
We picked up the tent & sleeping bags in the evening & filled up our bikes & headed towards the highway. We reached the highway by 7 in the evening. Initial thoughts, I had missed the long & wide open roads for quite sometime & I was elated & excited to rip my bike & ride long! Although, it was a short ride & the sight of the wide open roads reduced all the stress we went through crossing the city. The destination was about 100 km from that point, we cruised making decent speeds. We noticed the wet roads after we made around 50km & we even were blessed with slight drizzle until we reached Hotel Mayura where we stopped for dinner. It was around 830 & we decided to have dinner there & move on, for, the destination was just about 15km from there. It started raining cats & dogs with almost 0 visibility! Godwin took out his phone & turned on the GPS & maps to find out which way do we need to go further then WTF moment. All the while he had seen "wrong shettihalli" & our destination was 98km ahead! There was indeed a place by the same name close to the hotel, which is not where we were heading. We both were more excited as we got over 100 more km to ride & the heavy rain was icing on the cake!

We started our bikes, rode to the destination.
GPS & navigation helped us through the dark & desolate roads to this dilapidated place which once was an architectural marvel.
After reaching the place we set up the tent. Then it was time for us to take few pics & experiment with light.









With all these photography experiments done, we were back to business. We chalked out our ride plans & called it a day.
The next day, we woke up early for witnessing the sunrise. We weren't disappointed a bit!

















Finally Godwin with all the uber cool mods on his CBR!


Under the milky way - we camped. Amidst the darkness - we rode. Purpose of this run - served & finally a speed run back home completed my first ever camping adventure