we recently bought a nice place in this up and coming hub near the proposed international airport… yeah well you get the idea lots of promises loads of marketing spiel. The builder is one of the best, maybe the very best in all of Navi Mumbai and the buildings are pretty well rounded. So the idea was to put it up for rent and continue to stay where we are right now…. essentially let it pickle while we went and chased our rainbows…
So yeah the possession happened, we got the keys to the new house, spent a night here and then put up the posting on various real estate sites. The sheer volume of inventory in this area is such that the supply far outstrips demand at this point. A premium 3BHK residential unit like the one we own goes for close to 70K a month rental in the area where we stay currently. However the offers one would get at this point at Ulwe would not cross 12K per month! So much for the short term RoI. Then again one did not walk into this expecting the house to start yielding gold from day one so it has not been a let down in any manner at all… RoI will happen in the long term and then again there are other ways to utilize such an investment as we happily discovered these past couple of days.
This is the last week of vacations for the girls, next week onwards schools reopen. On a whim I had suggested “lets go stay at Ulwe for a few days”. It’s 15km from where we stay now but more importantly once we let it out we wont be able to enjoy this brand spanking new house ever again well it wouldn’t be brand new for sure. So a couple of nights back we loaded up the car and drove down. Essentially a vacation at home where we can still continue to work and yet be on vacation. Both of us love our work too much and do not think it is an invasion of our privacy if we need to work even during vacations…. I call it work life fluidity where you can be playing frisbee with the kids one minute and a few minutes later be in the middle of a conference call with participants in Bundoora, Nairobi, Gurgaon, Bangalore and Ulwe. Technology allows us to have that sort of fluidity and much as some people would like to convince us that this is not healthy we can throw back medical reports at them to prove that no dear it is in fact healthier than your 14 hour work day…. of course you need to be in love with your work to make this work for you…. if you think of work as, well “work” then it wont work out for you at all…. grudgingly done even a vacation would need a vacation to get over.
The first adventure was finding the security guard at 0030hrs and convincing him to open the gates. Poor fellow was enjoying his forty winks when I woke him up and asked him to switch on the mains for 704…. then the next morning I woke up at 5AM…. after a very long time this happened. Tried waking up the wife to see if we could slink out for a walk…. she turned around and went right back to sleep…. Anyway so I got out of bed went and had a shower and then a small voice chimes in “kahan ja rha hai”(where are you off to). I said “I was thinking of taking a walk you want to come along?”…. “OK”. Then madam gets out of bed and tumbles into the bathroom, has a quick shower, brushes her teeth and changes. Out we went at around 6:15 for our first walk around Ulwe. Me, 40 and my partner Ira, all of 5. It had rained mildly the past night and the roads had a few puddles at some places but were generally usable. We saw an eagle, a new school under construction and talked all along. Apparently we managed 3.2Km in 1 hour.
Later in the evening we again went out for a walk, found a broken road that goes into the sea, saw a double rainbow, stood and watched a fisherman catch fish using a fishing rod, saw oyster shells stacked up and the mother of pearl gleaming all over the place, found a quaint temple, saw Ria get extremely scared of three little pups…. aah well it was a good day…
For meals there are local hotels so we’ve not bothered with setting up the kitchen yet. The idea is to play it by the ear let the idea grow on us. We might bring an electric kettle and an induction cooker next time, maybe not.
Today morning I took them walking again, this time we went into a grocery store about 2km away and while coming back we walked up the embankment to climb onto the new railway tracks that connect this place to the rest of civilization. This is still under construction and trials will begin in another 3-4 months. That was another adventure.
SG worked through the day and is now downstairs with the kids feeding the fish in the tank downstairs and playing frisbee with them. I completed the migration of a domain for a client in Australia and am typing this out before I go down and join them…. it’s a vacation but frankly it’s not a strenuous “OMG I have to go on a vacation” and then “OMG it’s over I’ve got to go back to the grind again” type of vacation…. it’s a vacation that’s fluid… it is everyday accessible… Doesn’t mean that a full blown disconnect from every electronic equipment and go some place exotic is completely ruled out however this sort of accessible getaway highly diminishes the urgency of the full blown “vacation” vacation
We talked about it and figured that when we do find a great person to let it out to and this house gets occupied by a tenant we will quickly get a smaller house (maybe two) and use that as our home away from home getaway. Take unplanned vacations like this one even in the middle of the week when SG wants to work from home and the kids have an off day at school…. quick easy and as relaxing as a destination vacation if anything more relaxing as you do not have a checklist to tick just a free flowing exploration of the elements….. Going down now to again take them all out for a walk and maybe icecream 😀 rolling back to the other amazing home later tonight. Till the next staycation which could be next week end 😀