Good hotels in Katra?

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awa.....sry to here about ur nani yar.. 🙁

we had a family spiritual vacation too there is this place called shikharji, near Jharkhand Shikharji - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia where we need to climb this extremely big hill. I was pretty small back then maybe 9 or 11 pretty old story. Let me see if I can even write this in short the train that we took was I believe was a direct train but we had to get off somewhere in between as there happen to be some train collision where a goods train collided maybe with a passenger train. we had to take another train and we were with family I mean its just way too much responsibility also my aunty had come with us........... it was just impossible to get tickets for a another train which was pretty off route somehow we manged to get it. As the train was about to arrive maybe few min left I had this sudden pressure and there was no stopping it and the train was just about to come and there was no next train anytime soon it was like whole family motivating me come on dont worry just do it arram sai...... ( I was a kid come on I could't hold it ). Then we some how mange to catch the train I was pretty sure that I would have caused that train to miss...

As we got into our 2nd train by some miracle which would have been a definite miss........
........ some guys started to harass my family on the reserved compartment that we booked for ourselves by paying everything legally. Finally with gods grace a nice TT showed up saw both our tickets took all those guys who were creating a scene at probly 2 am in the night and did scold them and we never saw them again 🙂

...we had to get down at bodh gaya as that was the last stop for our 2nd train that we had to take it had I believe almost been 2 days ( it felt like days though ) that we had not slept because of the train collision and all still lingering in our minds that it was a pretty close escape as whole family would have directly gone straight to god irony that we going for darshan to gods temple only..

As we were still finding way to some how get to our destination we had to hire a taxi and oh my god !!! I have never been till now so scared of the way the roads are designed at the place I mean most of the time two wheels of the taxi were above the road (katcha road IdK if I can actually even call it a road it looked more like jhang ka maidan with such a small road with gigantic pot holes and such a thin road with cars coming from opposite direction too. ) and two wheels down I mean just imagine the horror. My aunty would start singing bhajan and honestly that some how did give that power to deal with the fact that our taxi might not topple. In between the roads there were like so many toppled trucks on the middle of this thin road...some probly rolled over into this trench where we had our taxis 2 wheel moving down and rest 2 up. I dnk how but that driver knew what he was doing and totally saved our asses.

Finally we reached bodh gaya temple which we would have not been too if it hadnt been for that train accident for which we had to take this pretty dangerous route.

Then from here I dont remember exactly but we did reach Shikharji som how finally and did that enormous mountain climb. Unfortunately the dolli wala did not take my mom and nanni to the highest top where one of our lords charan are there I think it really meant lot to my nani as she keeps telling in the family that our dolli wala did not take us to the highest peek for darshan. and ours did lol...ya it very nice luved it.

We also visited Bangalore...saw tipu sultan museum and that lightening garden show I cant remember the name lol......

it was undoubtedly my best family vacation even though the entire family could have gotten the direct ticket to lord at many instances. This Vacation is also memorable to me as I lost my Grandfather who just was everything to me....just cant even describe how memorable this family vacation was...
 
ah well. i did not take their packaged tour. the whole tour was very poorly planned in my opinion. 😕 airline tickets were purchased by brother (and were hellish expensive). hotel was my responsibility. i tried the two five star Hotels (country inn and white hotel) both were booked for friday. jai maa inn was recommended by a friend. luckily they had rooms available. i paid for the same online. but had to do all the arrangements offline on the phone. they never sent me back any confirmation. the only mail received was confirmation of payment with a warning that it would take them 24 hours to confirm the booking. this means that the payment system is probably not synchronized with their local booking system and someone checks it manually. anyways, i made sure that the rooms were available by calling in frequently. thankfully hotel did not caused any issues. 😀 chopper booking was supposed to be processed by a family friend. and relying on someone outside the family caused the mess. i guess he did not make the necessary phone calls in advance and friday turned out to be a heavy rush day in katra. so, we did not get the reservations for the ride and had to do it on foot. the traffic situation in katra was a mess. there were way too many people all around. long jams on all the intersections... i heard some people say that the crowd was as big as they have during the navratras. as for the hotel room prices. we paid 8k for one day for three rooms. one room with three beds. these prices were for their luxury room. the pricing mentioned at the hotel counter stated that the luxury room is otherwise priced at Rs. 3500. so i am not sure how exactly i managed to get a discount on online booking. it is however pretty clear that i could have managed to get a much solid deal if i had booked the hotel room on the spot after some bargaining. but that since the family was involved, i could not have taken that chance 😀 i can safely say that the rooms were pretty good for the price i paid. the bed was extremely comfortable and that helped after the 20-25 KM of walking! i had gone to VD last year as well with friends. the trip was much more pleasant at that time around. no crowd. it took us less than an hour at the darbar to do the darshan and have food and start the journey back. on friday night? it took a waiting for 2-3 hours in the priority line to get the darshan done. i bet the regular line had a waiting period of 5-6 hours... probably more. it was too much for me to handle so i came back early (don't ask!). brother stayed with the group and they came back a couple of hours later. i took some stairs on the way up... that managed to mess up something on the right side of my stomach. the pain was pretty unbearable at times. did not take any stairs on the way back. and that is why i am still able to walk right now 😀 in october last year, i literally took all the stairs while coming down. i was in massive pain for several days...
 
grr...made tons of grammatical mistakes what I wrote no wonder I had so poor marks in my English 😀 tried correcting it as much as I could 🙂
 
Well, it is always good to plan out in advance. I do most of my planning and all of my booking online, and in the process I have saved some mega bucks (I am extremely proud of this skill 😀 😛 ). Third party dependencies are best avoided for reasons you have already experienced.
 
well yeah. this tour was planned in urgency. bro and sis in law realized that they had the friday off. mom had been asking us to take her to VD for a while now. they finally decided that this extended weekend would be a good timing. i guess we were not alone taking this opportunity. as tons of other people decided to do the same 😀 plane tickets were booked on last saturday. i believe the ticket TO Jammu cost us 9K each. the ticket back cost us 5K each. (this alone put a lot of peer pressure on me considering brother had paid for it 😕 ). the hotel guys were pretty helpful and they could have arranged the chopper tickets for us considering they had a week to make the arrangements for us... but brother (he might not read this post so i can probably say it... is a smartass). i was told that i do not have to worry about the chopper. so well, i did what i had to do. sit silently.
 

considering me and my brother are not on talking terms, it is a pretty crappy feeling to have right now that he paid around 80K just for the plane tickets and i paid 8k for the hotel room.
 

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