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In 6 hours we leave for the airport. It’s been a long couple of weeks of tearful goodbyes, endless meals and gifted sweets, and truly suprising kindnesses. We are ready to go home, but we will miss all our friends and neighbors here. Last night we enjoyed our last nightride on the Enfields. The new owners of each will come this morning to take them to new homes :)

So we are headed to the airport… but we are not home yet! We have unfinished business with the beaurocratic stuff around transporting our Darjeeling street cur; it is not at all a given that she will make it home. The double-talk and mind-crushingly Byzantine procedures around international dog-shipping from here may defeat us, we do not know. The worst case is pretty damned grim.

We go from here to Delhi, where we will arrive tonight, and in the morning we leave by car for Agra and the Taj Mahal. Rumor has it there is a retirement village for dancing bears out that way, so we may have to stop…

Sunday we come back from the Taj, and in the wee hours of Monday morning, we board Emirates are for the first leg of the flight home, stopping over in Dubai. But still we are delayed: due to the dog (if she makes it that far), we must lay over for longer than 6 hours, per Emirates rules; and there is only one flight a day, so that really means 24 hours. So we board Emirates again for the final leg on Tuesday morning, to arrive in San Francisco sometime on Tuesday.

Gonna stop at Pancho’s on Polk Street and Kiji on Guererro immediately. After that we are turning on the invisibility cloak for a couple of weeks.

See you soon :)