Visting travel fairs should be in my syllabus so today morning, we dashed to ‘HT Destinations’, touted as a travel fair. This was not the first such fair under ‘HT Destinations’ and I remember seeing quarter page advts in the home-publication ‘Hindustan Times’. The last one happened as soon as March,11 so it is not something once-a-year event. I am guessing that HT is hoping to grow it and scale it up to a large level with possibly a lot of financial-transactions happening.

Coming back to this one.

Venue – The Park, Cannaught Place
Dates – Sep 17, 18, 2011

‘The Park’ is very centrally located so that is good. More importantly, you get a valet service and that is a big big plus since you do not have to get into any parking hassle. Here is the location map.

View Hotel in Delhi, The Park New Delhi in a larger map
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I started driving long distances after Oct 2001, when I bought my first car, a Maruti WagonR. Before that I have been a co-passenger, and my city driving was mostly on my 100 CC Bajaj Caliber. My drives were mostly around 250-300 Km radius in initial years. In Feb 2004, we bought a Mahindra Scorpio and over time our long distance drives have gradually increased to 500+ KMs a day. The longest single day drive for me, so far, has been from Delhi to Jaisalmer , and Delhi to Allahabad.

Its Aug 2010 now and a lot has changed in last 8-9 years. The changes are for better and what appeared like a real long drive in 2002 now looks like a morning drive to a lot of us. Drive from Delhi to Agra is not considered as a long drive and we all aspire to do Delhi-Manali or Bangalore-Mumbai in one day. We have better roads, improved infrastructure of supporting services like telecom, power and most importantly self driving is beginning to become a preferred mode of transport, at least for short family vacations.

So in light of all that, I thought that I would write a small tip-list based out of my personal experiences. A lot of it is standard stuff and you would know them by heart , e.g. check tyre pressure but I am hoping that some of these are new to you and are helpful.

The tips are not in a order, and I have not taken a lot of time thinking/planning so this is mostly from what I could remember.

Let me divide the tips in three sections.
A. Before the drive
B. During the drive
C. After the drive
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My wife had to do a recci for a press conference so I tugged along. It was to be ‘Pataudi Palace’. Let me give you some more information about the palace before we actually go there.

Nawab of Pataudi, Iftikhar Ali Khan got it built around 1935 and it is designed by Austrian architect Karl Molt Von Heinz. It has a very imperial kind of look, all white, tall walls (very unlike fort-ish). Home to Mansur Ali Khan Patuadi (more popularly known as Tiger), Sharmila Tagore and later Saif and Soha. Now its a hotel run by Neemrana Group and you can have this place for yourself without burning your pockets. Here’s the link of the Neermana.

Location
Not too far from Delhi, about 60 KMs from Connaught Place, Delhi. The directions are simple, just hop on to NH8 (Delhi – Jaipur road), drive till ‘Bilaspur’. Just before Bilaspur, you would notice a lot of constructions going on, my guess is that KMP (Kundli Manesar Plawal) is cutting NH8 on its way to NH 2. Right at Bilaspur, take a right turn and drive down for about 9 Kilometers.

Here’s Google Map.

View Larger Map
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Has it ever happened to you that right after you published your story, a new one slided in , almost in no time. The temptation of seeing your work in print is hard to resist. Ghumakkar displays stories on its home page based on time of publishing, so a recent story would be featured on top, though we have enough feedback to suggest that we should let Ghumakkar editors control the top of the shelf space. While internally we debate more on this, here’s a small step-by-step which might work, if all of us try to follow this.

Essentially, what you can do is that you can ‘schedule’ your posts to a future date. A small calendar would help you to quickly scan for ‘free dates’ (it sounds like an oxymoron, free dates) and if you (and everyone else) pick a date which is not already taken, then your story would get top-of-the-shelf for probably one full day.

1. After you are done with writing, take a look at the calendar. This is on your right.

2. This calendar shows you the dates in green, these are the days on which a post  is already scheduled. Do not pick them. Once you find a date, then instead of clicking ‘publish’ button, click ‘Edit’ adjacent to ‘Publish Immediately’. Choose a future day and time. In the below example, I chose June 02, 2010 at 0600 hrs.

3. As you press OK, you would notice that [Publish] button has changed to [Schedule]. Click it.

The calendar is just an added convenience, the feature to schedule your stories was there all the time. The Calendar helps you quickly scan the ‘free dates’. One other way to look at currently scheduled stories is to click at ‘Scheduled’ after you are in ‘Posts’ views/

A post could be one of the following viz Published, Scheduled, Drafts, Trash.

Click on image above to see it in big size

You should be able to look at currently scheduled posts by clicking on ‘Scheduled’.

Typically Ghumakkar doesn’t get more than one post every day, so if we all choose a free day, we get more time at the top of the page. And if you do not find anything scheduled for today and the last story is been there for at least a day, go for instant Nirvana and click [Publish]

Often, we are in a situation where we have visited a number of places as part of some long vacation and when it comes to writing a trvelogue at Ghumakkar, we do not want to write all of it in one single story. In fact the vacation may not be long and you may want to break your short vacation story in few parts. Breaking not only helps you to better focus on each location/place in the right detail but it also helps the reader since not everyone would want to do the same vacation with the same itinerary.

In all these cases, wont it be nice if a reader who reaches any of your stories through a ‘Google Search’ or while browsing the site, is presented with a small ‘Table of Content’ with links of the all the stories of that particular vacation.

Well, you can do this at Ghumakkar and here’s a small tutorial to achieve this. At the end of this post, I would also give you some links where this is being used at Ghumakkar.

5 Steps to create a series of posts at Ghumakkar

1. Write first post and Save it. Once saved, Edit the post and go to the bottom of the page. You would find two boxes like this

In the left box, choose “New Series” , click ‘Start’ and input a name. Click Save at the top right to save this.

What you have just done is that you have created a new Series and attached your first story with the series. Lets say that you create a new series called “Delhi – Sangla – Kaza – Manali – Delhi”

2. Now go ahead and publish the post.

3. Assuming that you would want to write another post for the same series, write another post/story and after saving again go to bottom.

This time, instead of choosing ‘New Series’, pick the name which you have created last time. See the snapshot below. And select ‘End’.

4. Now suppose you want to add another story, simple repeat the 2nd step. What the software does in the background is that it would make the current ‘End’ as ’2nd Last’ and the latest one as ‘Last’. It all works on the dates so the latest becomes the newest. ‘Start’ is the oldest in the series but in ‘Table of Content’ it appears first.

5. Nothing and enjoy your series of posts and send the link to your best friends. This is what a reader of your story would see if he finds any of your stories.

hope this is useful.If you have any questions please write a small comment below and I would promptly get back to you.

Till then, happy Ghumakkari and happy writing !!