Nantucket

Monday, July 3, 2006

So here I am travelling to Nanucket with Preeti and Swathi .... it was a very short trip (4 hours to be precise), but it gave us the feel of the place. We took the 1 hr island tour by bus which was good, but next time, I am definitely taking a bicycle with me.

Nantucket has amazing bike trails and according to the bus driver we should be able to cover most of it in 3-4 hours. Nantucket definitely promotes bicycling (well considering the narrow roads, driving would be a nightmare anyways :), better promote bicycling than having to deal with all the traffic mess :)). They have bicycle rental shops everywhere and as I wrote before, they have amazing bicycling tracks. While we are talking about traffic, there are no traffic lights in this town. All the traffic is managed through Stop signs and rotaries. (For those friends of mine who don't know what rotaries are, they are basically like a big circle and exits that go off them to go in the direction you need to from there).

Nantucket has 80 miles of beaches, all of which are public. Unlike most of the other coastal states/ towns, private ownership of beaches is not allowed here. There are no chain stores or restaurants in Nantucket. The only chain grocery store (and the main store) is "Stop and Shop". During summer, on an average it makes about $1 million in sales.

Tourism is the main industry here and during the summer they tend to employ a lot of foreign nationals for temporary work. Nantucket is the second busiest airport in MA (especially during the summer ... well to tell you the truth, except for Boston Logan, I can't even recall any other major airport in MA, so this wasn't as surprising).

Let's get some prices in perspective :)

95% of the goods used in Nantucket are shipped in trucks on the "Steamship authority". There are 4 gas stations in the town, all of which are supplied to by Mobil. While the gas price in Worcester, MA at this time was $2.92/ gallon, it costs $3.46/ gallon here. Oh, and by the way it costs $200 each way to get your car transported from Hyannis to Nantucket.

The minimum house costs about $1.5 mil. Two cottages by the docking waterfront (they were probably like 2 bedroom houses) which went for 4 million each last year. There is one yatch club (I think) which had ony 450 memberships and membership was $300,000 a piece. Similarly, there are 2 golf clubs in the town. One of them has 250 members at $250,000 a piece and the other had 350 memberships and each time someone wants to give up their membership, it is auctioned off with the bids starting at $500,000. And finally, you can rent cottages for 8-10 grand a week. Ok, that's a lot of money talk ... NEXT please :)




One of the 30 original owners of Nantucket was Thos Macy who finally sold his Nantucket business which for some reason was failing there.

December 2005 India trip

-- Note: For the photographs from this trip, look under the Links section on the right --


During the last week of my stay in India, we went to Nainital (It is a beautiful hill-station in the state of Uttar Pradesh -- about a 14 hour drive from Lucknow where we were living then). Now, this was only a 3 day trip (thanks to the wonderful new vacation policy in my father's office), which means we spent half the time getting to and from our final destination :).


The first day was spent at the in Ranikhet, about 120 kms from Nainital, but definitely a place worth visiting. On the way we visited the "Jhula Devi Temple". It is said that if you tie a bell at this temple (irrespective of the size) and pray to the goddess, your prayers will be answered (Condition of course is that you shouldn't tell anyone what you asked for). And no, I did not tie a bell there :D. By the way, look at the number of bells all over in the temple premises. The caretakers of the temple had a few lemon trees in their yard and they allowed us to pluck off a few (You can see that in the photographs).


Somewhere along the way, we got lost and instead of reaching the golf course in Ranikhet (from what we had heard, the view of the Himalayas from the golf course is beautiful), we reached the top of one of the hills via a rugged terrain to a visitors center. The view of the Himalayas from there was pretty good. In this process, we of course missed the golf course, but that didn't ,atter anymore. Many of these photos here you'll see were taken at the visitors center. Neha also got to play with one of the pet puppies (If I am not mistaken, his name was Sonu). I don't think Neha cared for anything more after that :), not the scenery, not the Himalayas, nothing :). The interesting fact about these puppies was that they could not live in flat terrain areas. These were mountain dogs and they would not be able to survive on flat lands :(. Anyways, so this was our first day.


On the second day we were on our way to have a day trip to the mountain in Nainital. I forogt the name of the one that we were driving on (mom, help me here please), but the one thing I can say is ..... IT WAS AWESOME. There were multiple ways to explore the mountain -- hike, take a horse ride or drive it up. Most cars were going up only to a particular point, but thanks to my mom and sister and of course the driver we had with our rented car, who was a good sport, we ended up going much much further than most of these cars. At one point, I must admit, I was reallllly scared. But the minor fear due to sharp curves, the scary height and the deep valley were more than compensated for by the breathtaking view.


Looking at that view, the excitement felt by mountain climbers was understandable, I guess (and of course I am speaking of the Himalayas here). Just looking at the Himalayas, even from so so far away, it felt, I don't know, heavenly ummmm ... peaceful, serene .... I really don't know how to describe it, but it was exquisite.


I don't think words really do any justice to what we were seeing or experiencing .... You just have to see it for yourself.


After returning from Nainital, we spent the next 3 days in a resort about 90 km outside Lucknow. (Which we needed considering that we reached home from Nainital at 5:00 in the morning and were back on the road in 2 hours so my dad could be in time for his meeting ;) ).

The three days at the Shivgarh resort were very relaxing. Other than sleeping and lazing around (and yes, I am speaking only for myself now ;) ) and a lot of sports, we had a round of boating in the lake. It was nice to be so relaxed, and sad in a way because in less than a week I was going to be back on my way to US. Oh well, all good things come to an end!