My husband and I celebrated 25 years of marriage last year. Nostalgic, I relived the best moments of my marital life. After marriage, I had pestered my husband to take me on a trip. My husband then retorted, “Is it mandatory that a marriage be followed by a honeymoon trip?”
After my constant nudging for six months, he yielded, and we decided to go to Yercaud. I convinced myself that it was better late than never. We embarked on our journey to Salem and then took a bus to Yercaud. On the way up the hills, I was nauseated and felt like retching. After several hairpin bends our bus finally landed in Yercaud.
Those were not the days of ubiquitous luxury resorts. We saw a seemingly decent hotel and carried away by the outer facade, booked our accommodation there. But as we entered the room, to our dismay we found it to be stinking with dirty linens. Water stagnated in the bathroom. To top it all, we had to bear with bed bugs during night. Our sightseeing trip in the sweltering heat was also a disaster. The Killiyur falls was just a trickle. We somehow stayed there for three days and returned home.
But as years rolled by, I realised that though we didn’t have a luxurious stay, we still had some of our best moments in that squalid place. We understood each other better by talking about our likes and dislikes. We learned to compromise and even bore the bed bug menace merrily. We realised that marriage is nothing but a long journey of understanding and building a bond between two different individuals from different walks of life. We have stayed in several cosy hotels after that but the experience of our first trip still lingers in my memory. After that trip my husband advises newlyweds to mandatorily take a honeymoon trip.