Day 1: Friday, the 16th of August 2019
I woke up early and got ready and we left home by 07:15 and headed to Royal Airavatha which is around 9 kms from my home.
let the ride begin
My plan for the entire trip was to ride in Ride mode and always keep the speeds in the range of 40kmph. It took me 20 minutes and 6 Kms of drop in Range to reach there.
Topping up
Fast
We had plans of having breakfast there itself. But the restaurant wasn’t open yet. So we put it for charging and went to another restaurant in the car.
Tricolour everywhere!
It was a little over an hour when we returned back and we finally left Royal Airavatha at 08:45.
The charging pit-stop was 65 kms from here. New York was another 11 kms further. I decided that If I’ve enough charge left when I reach the charging point, I’d continue further without stopping and come back to charge afterwards. This meant that I had to cover a total of 87kms before charging again. From my previous Kanakapura ride, I was confident of achieving this distance. But still I left the decision to how much range I would be left with when I reach Maddur.
Throughout, I maintained 40kmph speed while the Safari used to go faster and wait till I caught up. At this speed, I was able to cover a little over 1Km per 1% reduction in battery percentage. It was a little over 1.5kms of ride for every 1Km reduction in the displayed range.
Scooters in general are tiring for long rides and Ather is no exception. Every 20kms or so, I got down just to take pictures and walk 10-20 steps.
After having covered 46kms, I observed a strange thing. The ride screen wasn’t changing. It was frozen! I stopped the scooter but the ride screen didn’t change to the idle screen. I turned off the key and even then the display was on (but without backlight). When I turned back on, only the backlight was switched on.
Scooter off-Screen on
The Cntrl+Alt+Del of Ather (both brakes+power switch) restarted the scooter and sorted the problem. When it returned back to normal I saw that I had ridden for 4 kms in the same state
Anyway, back on the road, I continued in the Rajesh mode…oops Ride mode 
. It was the emptiest Mysore road I’d ever seen but I still exercised a lot of self-restraint and continued at that speed.
The different looking, green number plate, absence of an exhaust pipe in the Ather made many heads turn back. Because I was slow, at least 4 two wheelers came to my side, spoke all about the scooter while riding parallel with me. One two wheeler asked me to stop and they also took some photos.
By 11:15 I reached Maddur with still 33% battery remaining and 25kms of displayed range remaining. I decided to go to New York and come back.
20 minutes later we reached New York! Apart from a name board etched in stone, there is nothing else to see here so some snaps with both the vehicles, we headed back to Maddur.
Ather at New York!
Ather goes to New York
When I reached the shop, my colleague’s friend immediately identified that I must be that crazy guy who is riding to Mysore in a scooter 
I still had 9km of displayed range left when I put the vehicle for charging at 12:03. It displayed a duration of a little less than 2 hours for 80%.
Charging start
Pit stop duration
My friends Avinash and Guru had decided what to do in this time. They told me that we could go to Heritage Vineyards and Winery near Channapatna. It was around 20kms back towards Bangalore. It was a nice idea and we went there. On reaching, we found out that it was now renamed as Kadu Winery which is a brand of Sula Wines.
Kadu Vineyards and Winery
We registered for a Vineyard and Winery tour and a wine tasting session. It was a small setup and still under development after the takeover by Sula. We were shown the Vineyards. There were no fruits as the harvest season was over and also grape stomping event was also not there.
The Vineyards
We were then taken into the chilled room where the wines were stored. The tour guide explained everything about wine making in detail and answered all questions well.
The holding tanks
Then all of us were taken into the tasting room where we were explained everything from holding the wine glass to the right way of drinking and how to identify different taste notes were explained.
Tasting
After this we had lunch in the restaurant inside. At this time It started to rain heavily. I called up to check if it was raining in Maddur. Luckily it wasn’t and he told he will cover the charging point as a precaution.
Heavy rain during lunch
By the time we reached back it was 16:00 and the scooter was fully charged. However it started to pour again. It was so heavy that we couldn’t ride. We waited for an hour for the rain to subside. It didn’t stop completely but got lighter. With a rain coat, we started towards Mysore. By the time we reached Mandya, rain reduced down to a trickle and the ride went smooth.
Ride in the rain
In around 2 hours, we reached the Ring road on the outskirts of Mysore.
Mysore is here
We saw that there was around 22kms of range remaining and the destination was 17kms on the ring road. If we had gone through the city we could save around 9kms but since we had more charge we took the ring road and reached the destination by 19:15. The range remaining was 9kms. At 12hrs, this was by far the slowest Mysore travel for me
EOD
Now the plug point was in the ground floor garage and the home was in first floor. When Guru opened the garage door, we were in for a shock. The electric wires were burnt and there was no power in the garage! We checked a point at home and the portable charger was glowing green. However, the extension cord I had wasn’t enough to draw power from the first floor!
Then Guru took us to his in-laws’ home couple of kms away. There was a plug outside their home but when I plugged in the charger it was glowing red. Thankfully another point inside the home which was for their washing machine, was glowing green. We wired up and the scooter started charging. What relief!
We left the scooter and went back to my friend’s home. Had dinner and slept off
MYS board installed and I didn’t want to miss that. When I reached there, there were barricades before that so that vehicles can’t drive till that. An armed railway police personnel was also stationed. I went to him and asked if I can just take a picture. He told he can’t allow. It took me minutes to convince him to let me just take a picture. I had to request him, explain and show him all about the vehicle, tell him that I had come from Bangalore just for that picture etc. etc. Finally he let me in for 1 minute.
