The map of our drive from Santa Monica Beach to our hotel, in the email receipt.

I did not travel as much during this summer as I normally do. I recently visited Los Angeles for a few days. I vividly remember the time that my wife and I, both graduate students in New York City, drove from NY City to the west coast  and back in 1984. Olympics was held in LA and our friends who lived in the area purchased tickets for Indian men’s field hockey match against Australia. India was a field hockey power house early on. Indian men’s team bagged gold for 7 times between 1928 and 1964, bagging a silver in 1960. It has been all sagging since then!

Travel in the 80’s was exciting in its own ways, with limited technologies. We became AAA members just for this, got all the maps and the TripTik travel planners. Soon, our adventurous spirit took over and we bagged the TripTiks and simply wandered to interesting places that we found in the AAA books. No cell phones, no emails, no Google Maps! We were not that adventurous with food, so we took a rice cooker with us and would cover it with a towel to avoid the motel’s fire alarm from going off! Then we had all varieties of south Indian concoctions to mix the rice and eat with. We also stopped at a lot of our friends’ homes for great meals and memories. It was from there we would call our friends back in NY City to update our progress, whether they cared or not. Calling from motels was a costly proposition for graduate students.

India lost the game against Australia. Frankly they played so poorly that we found a husband and wife in the audience to be way more entertaining than the game. Every time India made a mistake, and there were too many of those, the wife would hit the husband as if it was his mistake and would literally cry… We ended up purchasing tickets for track and field from scalpers near the Coliseum and had a lot of fun experiencing the ’84 Olympics.

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