India Rickshaw Run Starts

We are off on a new adventure - and this one may well be the most crazy of them all.  We are spending the next 2 1/2 weeks driving Tuk Tuk rickshaws from Jaisalmer (a beautiful city on the border of Pakistan in the North of India) all the way down the west coast of India to Kochi in the very South.  Here is what has happened so far:
We spent the week before Christmas in Barbados with my family and all of the kids (what a gift to have all six of our kids with us for the holidays). It was great. This is a photo of me, my mom and sister on Christmas day.

Then - on December 26 - we headed off.  We are three different teams in three separate rickshaws:  Rainey, Zoe and Heidi (my sister) are the Karma Charmaleons, my niece Chloe and her boyfriend Chris are the Irie races and my niece Savannah and her boyfriend Bop are the Bajan Invasion.  Christmas presents were easy this year as I gave everyone matching suitcases and backpacks for the trip.  We can only take a small carry-on bag each as space on the rickshaws are very limited and had so many lay-overs we were afraid of bags getting lost in transit.  The travel to India was awful. From Barbados to Jaisalmer took us 3 1/2 days.We first went to Miami and had10 hour lay-over. We used the time to rent a car, run over to Target buy last minute things for the trip and eat at PF Changs (YUM). Then on to London for another 11 hour layover. We got hotel rooms at the airport hotel and got showers and a muli-hour nap.  Then on to Delhi with a 5 hour layover to Jodhpur. We were at our limit by then and ended up sleeping on the airport floor for much of that time.

Finally we arrived at our home stay for our first night in India.  We slept at a woman's home where she rents out rooms. It was not very luxurious but she cooked us a great dinner.

Today we rented a car to take us to Jaisalmer to meet our Tuk-Tuks. We arrived at the hotel with great pomp and circumstance and much bowing and greetings.
Our hotel is really quite nice (at least by India standards) and we'll be here for the next 3 nights (YEAH).

Then we walked about a mile to test drive our Tuk-Tuk (everything was working good so far). Fingers crossed it stays that way.
To read more about this adventure, get onto Chloe and Heidi's blog... they have been doing a much better job than me at keeping up and including lots of details:
chloehutch.wordpress.com
heidihutchblog,wordpress.com