September 18, 2016
It was a long discussion to have
a cycling trip to a far off place with one of my friends’ son, Rishi. I never
doubted on his fitness but had my own doubts if I could pedal far enough.
However now that I was pedaling to office which was 5 km far from my home since
a year, I had gathered enough immunity to take a bit more. I decided to go to
some place but often if you don’t fix a destiny the motivation to reach the
goal becomes flexible. Hence to give a meaning to our pedaling effort, I
decided to go to old temples and explore them. So we now fixed Venugopal Swamy Temple in Bagalur which
is 30km from my house. It didn’t make any difference to Rishi as he was just
interested to pedal. We were also accompanied by Rishi’s father and my cousin
whom I call dearly “Mama”.
All four of us got on our
bicycles and left to the temple at around 6:30 am. We didn’t dare to estimate
the time that we might reach our destination as we didn’t know our riding speed. We all had bicycles in good condition except for Mama and the issue was with
his bent pedals which almost activated the wrong tissues of the body and I had
to force him to change the pedal at some bicycle shop.
We reached the destination around
7:45 am which was not a very bad timing for the first timers. We had a glimpse
of the temple from outside as it was closed. We tried to inquire about the age of the temple and the person in the temple who was around 60 years old told us
that his grandfather’s father had not seen the construction of this temple which explains us that is was around 300 years old.
Before we returned back to
Bangalore we visited Mama’s colleagues house who was form the same village and they were very happy to see us pedaling for such a long distance. Our legs were strained with a good feeling in all of us. I felt this was one of the best
way to enjoy the nature.
We plan to do more of these so
with intention explore more temples and also keep ourselves fit.
Venugopal Swamy Temple
