Sunday at Daytona, FL

Sunday ushered in the end of what was one of the most memorable days of my life - a complete pleasure stay at Anup Bhaisaab's place, getting completely pampered by bhaisaab and bhabhi and with the loving presence of Rahul and Chandni - to visiting the Disney World parks and especially witnessing some of the once in a lifetime moments - of watching the Thanksgiving electric parades and fireworks at the Cinderella castle. Sunday started off as a lazy morning - we got calls from Hemant at around 7.30AM and I woke up and got ready to go with bhaisaab to fetch the couple from their Knight's Inn, Maingate lodging in bhaisaab's merc. What a cool, imposing vehicle that is. Anyways, we all came home after the 20 mins each side ride, and had breakfast of idli and dosas. We stuffed ourselves really silly till about 11.30AM and then, after a short visit to the bada ghar to meet beeji, Gopal bhaisaab and Saroj bhabhi one last time (hope to meet all of bhaisaab's family again this christmas...), we set off towards Daytona. We expected to meet Manish and Richa there at the Neelam restaurant on South Atlantic Avenue. Must admit, gujjus have restaurants, shops and gas stations in some of the hottest areas in any american city. We reached Daytona around 1.30PM..its quite like Goa with a weather like Bhopal in Spring - very pleasant..there are 4-5 storey buildings lined up along the beachline which are primarily residential and tourist hotels. Life looks quite lazy except for the presence of bikers here and there - we also saw some real rich dudes on their Bugattis, and saw the NASCAR stadium from the outside. Unlike our seafront, there is a very thick hedge like divider separating the road from the seafront esplanade and that makes it not a very scenic drive. Anyways, we didn't have any mobile phone with us - ours was with Manish Sharma and we had to call Bhaisaab to inform them of our coordinates and plans. We finally got that near a beach walk-out. A walk-out is a wooden ramp that extends out into the sea till the edge of the land and looks quite like a peer or a gangway for boarding a ship or a vessel. There however is a toll-gate for that and we were charged 6 dollars for the four of us (all included) to go up the ramp. The entire ramp was full of anglers with their fishing poles and iceboxes. There was a small store nearby where one could buy fishing lines, baits, etc. The girls, being veggies, had a bad time with the all pervading smell of dried fish. Lots of people were surfing too - though it hardly looked like a surfable place - the water was very calm. The water looked quite dirty - it was all brown, perhaps due to the sand and the surfers. We just grabbed a few cans on coke and spent some time at the edge of the ramp, looking at the anglers patiently waiting for some fish to get hooked up. Reminded me so much of the idle Bhopalis who spend the whole days in and around the Bada Talaab. A japanese guy caught a small carp like fish and immediately rushed to his ice-box. I almost thought he'd eat sushi right there. But I guess he wanted to keep his prized catch a little longer...We left Daytona for Columbia at around 4PM...the road was long and the traffic was dense...we saw a car in flames on the right hand shoulder once - no one could have survived that kind of an accident on the interstate...We were back home at 10.30PM, driving at around 80mph (144 kmph)...