Arrival in Delhi

As I write this I'm on the tail end of the flight to Delhi. Fortunately, I largely got over the cold I caught earlier in the week, so I was able to board the plane without being too much under the weather. With the help of a NyQuil and an Abmien, was able to get a good 5 hours sleep early during the 15-hour nonstop flight from Chicago, and I've spent the rest of the time trying to make more detailed plans for the trip. This is what I'm going to try to do, day-by-day:

-arrive in Delhi
-Delhi
-Delhi
-flight to Varanasi
-Varanasi
-morning flight to Khajuraho
-Khajuraho
-get to Agra
-Agra
-head to Jaipur
-Jaipur and Amber fort
-Pushkar and Ajmer
-travel to Jodhpur
-Jodhpur, night train to Jaisalmer
-Jaisalmer, night train back to Jodhpur
-travel to Udaipur
-Udaipur
-fly to Hyderabad
-Hyderabad
-fly back to Delhi, fly home at night

I've actually a couple more days to use on my trip. Those will be flex days I can use wherever, so I don't have to be constantly worrying about keeping to a strict schedule. To do this the flights to Varanasi and Khajuraho will also still have to be available by the time I get to the hotel and can book them (fingers crossed). I also may jumble the order in which I'll do Jodhpur and Udaipur. I'm actually taking the first part of the trip a little slower than I had wanted to, but that's by necessity. My original plan had me getting to Agra and the Taj Mahal a day earlier, but I realized that unfortunately, that would put me there on a Friday (the Taj is an active mosque, so it's closed for everyone by worshippers on Friday).

Hopefully they're going to feed us soon here. There's a 12-hour gap on this flight between dinner and breakfast. I slept for a good chunk of it and ate a Clif bar and some snacks, but still, I'm starving. It's too bad the sun has already gone down. It would be interesting to see what's on the ground. We took a northeasterly route out of Chicago, flying directly over Greenland, across the Arctic Ocean, just barely skimming the top of the Scandinavian countries, and then came down through Russia. We're flying into the sun, so during the short window of daylight all I was able to see was a cloud carpet underneath us or empty Siberian snow cover. According to the flight path information on the entertainment system, we appear to be passing over what I believe is Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan at moment. If we hold this course, it actually appears like we'll fly right by Kabul in the next 20 minutes. Good times.