Cedar Rapids, Iowa is a tranquil, quaint little place close to Chicago, Minneapolis and St Louis. We were supposed to start for this trip on March 2, 2012 around 2pm. Our friend Kiran was supposed to arrive at noon to drop us the airport. The bags were getting packed upto the last minute and tremendous anxiety about weight restrictions made us check their weight using a puny handheld instrument. Suddenly as I straightened after closing the last zipper my back got locked (muscle pull..!). I had exactly 1.5 hours before we walk out of the door. Outside ice storm had started. I had to buy good walking slippers for both of us since it would be very hot in South India and Tirthankar was at work. Dousing in Bengay, I crawled into the car and started when my husband arrived from work and warned me of the extremely slippery road condition. He had to finish his last minute packing. Skidding and sliding most of the way I inched into the parking lot, of the mall, got a pair for T and another pair for Swami D and returned home to find Kiran already parked in the driveway. Kumar also had come to bid goodbye and drop off some last min essentials like antibacterial wipes.
We hastened excited pranams to Thakur (Sri Ramakrishna) and Ma (Sarada Devi), bundled into Kirans’s car and started off on our epic journey right on time.
Due to weather of course our flight was cancelled and we were booked into another flight to LHR (Heathrow) via Minneapolis. We would have one and a half hour in London to pick up our luggage, check it in and meet Maharaj and catch the flight to India. So we called him from Minneapolis to warn him that there might be a chance of us missing the flight and we will go to Vrindaban on our own if this so happened. We were getting heartbroken at the very thought of not being able to travel with Maharaj, the sole purpose of our trip. Our pilgrimage started with being in maharaj’s company and the thought of losing it at the very start was unbearable.
But of course Mother had to make this interesting otherwise it would be too straightforward.. boring..! A lot of heartfelt sincere japa as piteous cries were directed to her. So she relented.. our aircraft arrived on time, with all our luggages intact and finally after checking in we found ourselves in the brand new terminal C with just our carryons.
We spotted Maharaj’s ochre garb in a distance sitting in the lounge his back to us. So we snuck up on him from behind from both sides vying with each other on who gets to do his/her pranams first..! Our sparkling sets of 32s (teethy grins) betrayed the tremendous joy and excitement. Maharaj was very happy to see us and we had our first trip-coffee together.
Very soon we were called to board and the seats were comfortable with maharaj occupying the window and Tirthankar getting to sit next to maharaj. The deal was I would get to seat next to Maharaj on the way back. I had loads of Advil (ibuprofen) and Bengay (muscle relaxant) on (which was forgotten for the moment in the excitement) which I did not want maharaj to know hoping I would become alright by the time I reached Delhi.
On the way we had quite a few discussions on various points but he wouldn’t let us record those. Yes, thankfully I carried the voice recorder along with my camera and extra memory sticks + battery charger of course..!
Maharaj is greeting anyone who gets to travel with us on this pilgrimage.
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