Mysore is a perfect weekend trip from Bangalore. Now with the Bangalore-Mysore expressway, you can reach Mysore within just a couple of hours. Of course leaving Bangalore takes another hour. Basically, you can leave Bangalore early morning on a Saturday, spend a day in Mysore and come back by Sunday evening to Bangalore.

The origin of our Mysore plan was with my wife’s deep desire to take my daughter to the Mysore Zoo. Being the crowd phobic person I am, I made it very clear that I do not want to risk a zoo trip on a weekend. So we planned to leave from Bangalore on Friday morning. Once we reach Mysore, we can spend the rest of the day in the Zoo. And then Saturday we would spend leisurely, coming back to Bangalore on Sunday.

We did start on time on Friday. We reached the stay in Mysore, a place called 1000 Silvers, a farm stay, around 12:30pm – 1pm. But after reaching, no one showed interest in going to the zoo. So in spite of my inhibitions, I had to agree to venture into the zoo on Saturday.

The place 1000 Silvers, was quite nice. Around 20kms away from Mysore city, it had quite an amount of open space, lot of trees, few birds (ducks, geese, turkey, etc.) and also a horse. There were couple of dogs too. They were kept locked in the kennel.

The rooms were quite big, and easily accommodated the 6 of us (Me, my wife, my parents, my 4 year old daughter and Mishki, our dog). It had a bunk bed, which my daughter loved, and had a gala time going up and down the stairs.

For dinner, we went out to a place called Courtyard Tree. It was quite far from our place (around 20kms), but it seemed any decent restaurant was about the same distance.

Food was good. Also it had good ambiance, with lot of open space for kids to run around.

The next day we finished breakfast and headed for the Zoo.

The zoo was amazingly clean. It is quite in contrast with the Bannerghatta zoo, which looks like a big garbage ground.

The elephants and giraffes which were at the very end of zoo walk, were quite magnificient.

I found the whole of Mysore city, to be very well managed. Clean, well organised traffic. It does not look like it is part of same state which also has Bangalore, which is a quintessential example of governance at its worst.

Mysore is a small city and around the zoo, there are lot of places to explore. We went to the Train Museum.

It is an amazingly clean and well maintained place, with lot of vintage trains, old engines, and other artefacts which were used in railways before.

We had a good time here.

Post this we went to Gayatri Tiffin Room, had some nice Dosa.

Then headed to a place called Sukhavana.

Supposedly, here there were lot of birds and you could play with them.

The reality was quite different. There were lot of birds, yes. There was also a beautifully maintained garden. But the birds were all caged and chained. There were only a few birds which were free. Also there were few Macaws which you could place them on you and take photos.

There was a short queue, post which we took a photo with a Macaw sitting on our hand.

We came back to the farm stay post this. We had packed some food from GTR which we had at night.

Next day, Sunday, we finished breakfast and headed back to Bangalore. We reached Bangalore by 2pm.

It was nice memorable and refreshing tour.