The blog begins…
The last time I rode to Leh was in 2008 and some of the memories from that time are captured here. When Setu and I left from there we knew we wanted to be back someday. Since then there have been some small rides. Setu works off a different continent now and I have grown older 
Ashish has always been a part of our own desi version of the Wild Hogs (see here) and he has also paid his tributes to the Himalayas.
It was just logical that we’d now get together again for a ride. Ashish and I started planning a ride again a few months ago. It was going to be destination Leh again. The usual stuff around planning work schedules, getting vacation, etc. was required. We’d like to believe that we are so critical at our work place that our absence for 2 weeks would hamper normal functioning. When we come back and find that it really hasn’t, we’d again like to believe that we have planned our schedules and vacation so well that we minimized disruption to work. Delusions of grandeur, indeed!
As we started working out the details we began to fall in love… whoa there… hold your horses… I meant to say that we fell in love with the pictures of Spiti valley. Not to mention that Ashish and some buddies of his had been till Rampur on their previous trip and they were gushing about the place. Some more reading about it in various blogs and forums and we were hooked to that idea.
In any case, first things first. An essential ingredient of good planning is to demonstrate commitment to the objective. Hence we shipped our bikes off today. Now we are forced to plan the rest. Or at the least, at least have to go to Delhi to get the bikes back.
And while we were waiting for the bikes to be shipped I was busy. For those who don’t know, the places we go to usually don’t have a data connection (2G/3G/whatever). Most places support only good ol’ SMS. So, in order to send out updates I need an SMS based mechanism. Worked on ancient Web 2.0 technology. Managed to figure out how to get the blog to forward to twitter and Facebook. Then realized I can’t update blog via SMS. So configured twitter to forward to Facebook. Oops! Cyclic forwarding. Hoped that I wasn’t going to responsible for bringing down the Internet with a post-forward-cycle. Fortunately that didn’t happen (I mean, we are all still here, aren’t we?). Fixed that. Now I have a functional system. I can post to twitter which will then forward to Facebook (to take care of FB friends). The post will also update the blog (for those who are not on FB, e.g. senior citizens of the family). I also managed to configure twitter to post to our workplace communication system (you must really check out tibbr). This will update our work-colleagues, who I am sure will miss during our vacation 
And hence this post. The plan is to update this regular with status of the trip.
