Leaving Mumbai

We're rushing around this morning trying to get organized for the next leg of our journey. I wanted to post on the trips yesterday to the Lakshmi Temple and the Haji Ali Mosque, but a combination of slow wifi at the Hotel Sea Palace and some last minute snafus is going to have to push that off for a couple days. We woke up this morning to find that the credit card machine at the hotel is down and they haven't fixed it yet, which means paying in cash - which is going to put a major kink in our plans (that's a lot of rupees that have to be paid out instead of putting it on a machine). We had factored in money for meals and incidentals (and paying our great friend John back for his arrangements of train and plane tickets), but were planning on putting all the hotels on the credit cards - doh! So, that meant we had to catch at taxi over to Thomas Jones to cash in some of my father's travellers checks as well as running by a bank so that I could use the ATM. Very annoying, but hardly the worst experience that I've had overseas. John will be swing by between 11:30 and 12:00 so that we can begin organizing the rest of our day. The train doesn't take off from Victoria Station until around 3:45, so we were hoping to maybe have lunch or do a little last minute sight-seeing. There's a great museum near here that I've visted a couple times, and I was hoping to convince Annie to run in with me. Once we're finally on the train we're facing a 26 hour train ride down to Katpadi Station, where Mr. Babu from Babu Travel will pick us up at run us over the the big guest hourse at the CMC in Vellore. Tomorrow will be a tour of the hospital itself, which I blogged about before - it was one of my more recent posts where I was trying to recreate earlier experiences. I don't know when I'll be on next, although I can post from my Blackberry for text. Right now, in addition to blogging, I'm also doing last minute packing and charging up my phone and camera. What a day.