This trip a few days ago was different from the domestic and foreign trips that I've done so far. No more miserliness. Not worrying about high taxi rates [worrying about paying high taxi rates spoiled my mood a lot during our Singapore trip in 2019]. Eating at the best restaurants and cafes and not worrying about menu prices. Staying at one of the topmost hotels there. Ordering lots of food via room service, and not worrying about the prices of items. Not negotiating with taxi drivers. And so on.
We spent with the silent background assumption that we were on an international trip, and this extra spending decisively multiplied the joy and satisfaction we received from our trip.
To be honest, McLeod Ganj and Dharamkot are both already not-so-expensive places. Aside from local cab / taxi rates, hardly anything else is more expensive there - with Ludhiana prices as the benchmark / reference. This itself helped a lot. But even if McLeod had been somewhat more expensive than it is now, we would've still spent without the miserliness associated with my previous travels within or outside India - because this time I had told myself that I'm gonna spend during this trip as if it were a foreign trip. The focus here is primarily on the new way in which we spent, and not primarily on McLeod's relative inexpensiveness.
The generalization here is that even intra-India leisure trips should be made as if you're on a foreign trip. If you keep trying to save money here and there on your Indian trip - and this I'm saying from several of my personal traveling experiences within and outside India - then you'll end up enjoying much less.
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