Travel Itinerary during summer 2008

This summer (Mar. - Aug. 2008) I have traveled a bit (not a lot). So much so that people in Leuven have started assuming that I won’t be around in town during weekends and in a process have missed a lot of invitations and delicious food…..hahaha.

Rucha & some friends have started saying that I have been doing everything other than PhD. So I decided to take a stock of the situation. My travel itinerary during summer 2008 looked like this:

• Natural Born Hiker (NBH) Treks….Thomas has baptimized the trekking group as NBH: 5 Days (missed one trek on Friday because of work. I need to highlight this fact)
• Berlin trip with Naveen: 3 days
• Frankfurt Trip to meet Koti: 4 days
• Italy (Como-Venice-Rome-Pisa) Trip: 6 days. I had to take 3 days vacation for this. Don’t you think I needed to award myself for an effort during IEDM submission? Fair enough I guess.
• French Open Finals: 2 days
• Maastricht @ Anant’s place: 2 days
• Trip to Trier: 1 day
• Trip of Keukenhof: 1 day
• Trip to Amsterdam: 1 day
• Dinant with Prof. Nandita: 1 day
• Ghent to meet Prof. Nandita: 1 day
• Brussles Flower Carpet: 1 day
• Sand Castle in Blankenberge: 1 day

These 29 days traveling include ~180kms of trekking during hikes, 29 x 200 (Avg. pictures in a day) = 5800 pictures in total. If I go for kayak (which I plan to do) for the last weekend of Aug. it would be 30 days (a month) of travel in 6months. Now, is that a lot??? I am sure that there are many who do better. As usual ”Yeh Dil Maange More” and I have the following things on cart:

• Waterloo for a day
• Radha des for a day
• 2 NBH hikes: 2-3 days

And then I would let the winter begin......

1 month (4 weekends spent entirely in Leuven) of travel in a span of 6 months is not bad and I accept that I have traveled a bit but I refute the claim that I have not been working or doing everything other than PhD. I have worked only for 2 weekends (but hey I am not supposed to work over weekends) this season, one during the IEDM deadline and this weekend as I have a lot of things on my plate. During One weekend we made long awaited Vadapav at Naveen's place and there was only one weekend in 6 months which I can call to be unproductive.....Anyway, enjoyed every bit of this season and I hope that this wonderful summer continues….