The Munnar trip - Chennnai to Trichy

"The first rule of driving in cities, never change lanes suddenly" cried Cobra in his instinctive all knowing tone. "I know, I know, that was just a mistake", explained Sriram. "I know that you know and this type of attitude is what causes accidents, I am just reminding you anyway." and then he went onto saying those lines of his which he repeated almost a zillion times during the trip, "You have accidents only when you hesitate, you either just overtake or just duck, you don't do both and if you do thts the end." So started our trip with exchange of ideas and knowledge and experience. We(read me, bomma, and julie) the ordianry mortals who were just there supposedly enjoying the trip were in fact literally putting our lives in their hands.
Within the first 10 minutes, we all knew that its not munnar that was going to be interesting but the journey itself. Although we were behind schdule by about 4 hrs (btw, whose schedule was it), the plan was clear. Start asap, go to pondi asap, fill whatever is to be filled asap, and reach trichy asap. The rest of the plan would be decided the next day. Though sriram started the trip, he being on the recieving end decided to be the one who would shout, and gave the steering to Cobra. And so started one of the riskiest drives I was ever in, more so because he insisted he knew what he was doing.
The drive upto pondi was pleasant with all the characteristic initial enthu, with all the PJs going on behind. We even tried to play cards inside the car with julie bending back from the first seat and me sitting in a position so as to maintain the deck of cards in a state of equilibrium, though unstable. I forgot to mention that I was nominated the financier for the trip to maintian all the spendings and the cash. Bomma was as alway doing nothing but to instigate comments from Sriram who was enjoying all this with his shady doped laugh. Cobra was enjoying the drive trying to maintian the much needed emotional balance and composure to take us safely to pondi. He was really grt without getting distracted by all the noise and nonsense we had created in the back, which he later made us realise that it was not the real him that we were seeing.
Thank god, and we reached pondi just behind schedule and filled the tank with as much petrol as we could. Then we went on to fill the other stuff and spend a lot of time deciding what to fill it with and trying to know the legal issues involved in transporting the fluid from one state to the other. We bought the fluids stored them much appropriately and started off for trichy.
The drive upto trichy was much calmer a the intial enthu had evaporated and was replaced with a sense of nausea. The unavailability of music in our car made us to try hard to invent nonsense in order to keep conversations alive, and keeping a conversation alive is essential to prevent the driver from dozing off. The nonsense ranged from disucussions about movies to politics to apps to jobs to life in general. Wet with all this nonsense we reached Trichy and took up the first rooms that were available to rest for the night.