Wheels up Sunday, 20 September 2026. Four Indian cities and a campus visit stand between here and the gate. This is the running order for all of it — the domestic legs, the money, the paperwork, and the first week on the ground in San Francisco. Tick as you go; progress saves in this browser.
1. Ganesh Chaturthi is Monday 14 September. A full Karnataka public holiday, banks closed. The 13th is a Sunday and the 12th is a Second Saturday. That leaves Tuesday 15 September as your only banking day before you fly. Order the forex card online today so a courier, not a bank counter, is what stands between you and having money in San Francisco.
2. Bangalore fixes the whole schedule. The only Sunday–Monday–Tuesday before departure is 13–15 September, which pushes Kharagpur into 10–12 September and Bijapur into 16–18 September. Nothing else fits around a 20 September departure.
3. Return date still open. “By 30 November” means a ~10 week stay. If that is right, US housing is a sublet and not a hotel, and the travel insurance has to cover the full duration. If you meant a short trip, say so — half this list changes.
4. Thanksgiving is Thursday 26 November. SF shuts down 25–29 Nov. Plan to have every deal conversation closed by Tuesday 24 November.
This is the leg that starts everything. 81 daily services means seats exist, but the good Volvo sleepers go early. Book on redBus or AbhiBus this afternoon.
Bangalore to Kolkata is a dense route with many daily departures. A midday slot gets you to campus by evening with the overnight bus arrival absorbed.
140 km, roughly two and a half hours, around ₹4,000. Arrange it in advance rather than negotiating at the airport taxi stand after a flight.
Protects the full Saturday on campus. Stay in Kolkata on Saturday night rather than attempting a pre-dawn run from Kharagpur.
Same 81-service route in reverse, overnight. Book now — you will not want to be arranging this after a day of bank paperwork.
Departs Bijapur 18:40, arrives Mumbai CSMT around 04:20 Saturday. Direct, no connection. Indian Railways reservations open well in advance and this is eight days out — book today or you are on a waitlist.
You arrive CSMT at dawn on Saturday and fly long-haul on Sunday. A room near the international terminal turns a risky morning into a routine one.
Construction was reported at 99% with operations targeted for Ugadi 2026, but final clearances were still pending as of August 2026. It is not a plan. Kalaburagi is 144 km away and Belgaum 185 km, both with thin networks — which is why this whole itinerary routes through Bangalore instead.
BookMyForex delivers forex cards to the door on the same working day across 20+ cities including Bangalore, seven days a week, for orders paid with documents in before 1 PM; elsewhere they courier within two days. They also lock your rate for up to three days. This is the single move that routes around Ganesh Chaturthi entirely — a courier does not observe bank holidays.
HDFC issues the ForexPlus card immediately at a branch on document submission, and existing customers are reported to be able to self-issue through netbanking in around five minutes. If you already bank with HDFC this costs you nothing to test and could close the whole question before you board tonight’s bus. Verify the current process on your own netbanking rather than trusting a summary.
Your one banking day. HDFC is the fastest counter issuance of the three. ICICI and SBI both offer genuine multi-currency cards but neither is documented as reliably same-day, so treat them as third choice. Go in the morning, not after lunch.
Bangalore is inside the same-day delivery zone and you are there on the 13th, 14th and 15th. Bijapur is not, and a two-day courier arriving on the 16th or 17th leaves no margin if something goes wrong.
Niyo Global is a zero-markup debit card rather than a forex card, and account opening plus card delivery runs five to seven days. From the 10th that lands somewhere around the 17th at best, in Bijapur, with no recovery time. Worth having for future trips; not for this one.
US hotels and car rental desks place pre-authorisation holds that forex and prepaid cards routinely fail. Without a real credit card you can be refused at check-in holding a confirmed booking.
PAN, passport, the US visa page, and the SFO ticket. Loading foreign currency happens under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme and neither the online order nor the branch can process without all four. Scan them to your phone now — you will be on buses and trains for much of the next week.
Loading above a threshold per financial year attracts tax collected at source at 20%, which you later claim against income tax. The threshold has been revised recently and I would not trust a remembered figure — get the current number and your expected liability confirmed in writing before you load.
Ten weeks with rent, co-working and client meetings is a large number. Do not put all of it on one card at one exchange rate. Load part now, keep the rest reloadable from the app, and keep an Indian account funded and reachable from abroad.
One small transaction on each. A card that declines on day one in San Francisco, with the issuing branch twelve and a half hours behind you, is a genuinely bad week.
Short trip or 10-week stay. Every line below branches off this. Decide today.
Ten days out, fares climb daily. Buy a changeable fare or one-way — a 10-week trip will shift. Nonstop if the price gap is under ~$250; a 20-hour connection costs you a working day on both ends.
Passport valid at least six months past your intended exit, two blank pages. Confirm the visa class permits the full stay — B-1/B-2 is typically admitted for up to six months, but the actual duration is set by CBP on the I-94 at entry, not by the visa sticker.
Do not commit ten weeks to a place you have not stood in. Bridge with a serviced apartment or Airbnb for 14 nights, then sign the long sublet once you know which neighbourhood your meetings actually cluster in.
Warm list first — existing contacts, LinkedIn first-degree, investor and advisor intros. Specific dates convert far better than a vague “visiting soon”. Nothing else on this page matters if the calendar is empty when you land.
Non-negotiable. A single US emergency-room visit runs five figures. Minimum $100,000 medical cover plus emergency evacuation, and the policy period must span the entire stay. Compare SafetyWing, IMG Patriot and Genki against insurers in your home country — domestic policies are often materially cheaper for the same cover. Check the pre-existing-condition and adventure-activity exclusions before you buy.
Budget roughly $3,000–5,000/month furnished. Blueground, Landing and Furnished Finder do one-month minimums; Airbnb discounts 20–40% on stays of 28 nights or more. Target SoMa or Mission for startup density and walkability; the Peninsula only if your accounts skew enterprise.
At this length a monthly membership beats day passes, and the room itself is pipeline. It also gives you a credible address to take meetings at instead of a rotation of coffee shops.
Create the account, then subscribe to the SF calendars rather than hunting event by event — Luma Discover filtered to San Francisco, plus the AI and founder calendars people in your space actually run. Turn on notifications and RSVP to your first fortnight now: the good rooms cap out and waitlist.
The a16z-run Tech Week typically lands in SF in early October, which falls inside your stay. It is several hundred parallel events on Luma over one week — the single highest-density customer-discovery window you will get. Confirm the 2026 dates and block the calendar.
File a travel notice with your bank, carry two cards on different networks (Visa and Mastercard are universal; Amex is patchy at small US merchants), and use a zero-forex-markup card. Add a Wise or equivalent multi-currency account as a backup. Tell the bank the stay is ten weeks so the fraud engine does not freeze you in week three.
An eSIM (Airalo, Holafly) covers the first few days. For a stay this long, switch to a US prepaid plan — Mint, US Mobile or T-Mobile prepaid — so you have a US number. Several US services and a lot of people will not text an international number.
40–60 named Bay Area accounts with the actual decision maker on each, ranked by buying signal. This is the long pole of the whole trip. Pull it from your CRM and prospecting data rather than assembling it by hand.
Calendly or Cal.com, availability set in America/Los_Angeles, with realistic travel gaps between slots. Put the link in your email signature before the outreach lands.
Carry the full ten weeks of any medication in original labelled packaging with a doctor’s letter — refilling a foreign prescription in the US is slow and expensive. Pack a basic kit; even over-the-counter medicine is priced painfully.
Border officers ask about a long business stay. Have ready, on paper and on your phone: return or onward ticket, employment or company letter stating the business purpose, proof of funds, accommodation confirmation, and any meeting or conference invitations. Your answer is business meetings and customer conversations — you are not being paid by a US entity.
Visa page, passport bio page, ticket, insurance certificate with the 24-hour assistance number, housing confirmation, invitation letters. Offline on the phone plus one printed set — airport wifi fails at exactly the wrong moment.
Pick the seat, and confirm the baggage allowance against what a ten-week stay actually needs.
A couple of hundred dollars in fives, tens and twenties for tips and the handful of cash-only places. The US tips: 18–20% at restaurants, a few dollars for a driver.
San Francisco is 12–20°C year-round, windy, and genuinely cold once the fog comes in — layers and a real jacket, not summer clothing. By November add rain. Bring Type A/B plug adapters (US mains is 120V) and a laptop charger you have tested.
Anything time-critical at home needs an owner for ten weeks. Note in the auto-reply that you are on Pacific time so nobody reads a 14-hour delay as being ignored.
Departure-side pickup, and know how you get from SFO to the door — BART runs from the international terminal into the city and is fastest at rush hour; a rideshare is easier with heavy luggage.
Get to the apartment, buy groceries, sleep on local time. Do not schedule anything for Sunday evening.
Do it on day one. Then update the number on your booking link and email signature.
Clipper card in Apple or Google Wallet covers Muni, BART and Caltrain. Rideshare for anything with a hard start time; skip the rental car unless your meetings are South Bay-heavy.
Cluster the day geographically — SF downtown, Peninsula, or South Bay, never a mix. Four meetings a day is the realistic ceiling once Bay Area traffic is priced in.
Cold pipeline starts in rooms, not inboxes. Founder dinners and small topic-specific meetups convert far better than large conferences.
Same-day note with a concrete next step. A ten-week trip generates more conversations than you will remember by Friday.
“Who else should I be talking to while I’m here?” Warm intros compound; by week four they should be outproducing your cold outreach.
Meetings held, opportunities opened, what moved. Ten weeks is long enough to drift for a fortnight without noticing.
Q1 budget planning is live and buyers are receptive. Everything must be signed or clearly committed by Tue 24 Nov — Thanksgiving takes the rest of the month.
Photograph every receipt the day you get it. Reconstructing ten weeks of business travel spend in December is misery and you will lose deductions.
Check your admitted-until date on the CBP I-94 site after you land — it is the date that legally governs your stay, and it is not always what you assumed. Overstaying voids the visa.