Time for a small pat on the back! That’s alright, I’ll get it myself. I have set gears in motion in preparing for a successful deployment to Nepal. If you’ve been following, I’ve administered self-induced altitude sickness, randomly selected vaccinations, and packed my woobie in a duffle bag. To relax I wrote a section on the homepage about getting medical insurance for international travel. Once again, the teacher is the student, and it’s pretty obvious that is going to be one of the most important things for me to prepare, even more than packing some chapstick. Let’s just say my current level of health insurance is very limited. I need to research further about which domestic health insurance policies may extend to international travel. I also need to nail down whether one of those comprehensive travel insurance packages I recommended covers more than just specifically blue moon alien abduction encounters, or if it also covers the more common Nepal trekking misfortunes.

With only 19 days and a wake-up before we depart for Nepal we felt a subtle impression that we might want to go over our packing list to make sure we have enough Snickers bars and pee bottles. That long list of essential trekking equipment is intimidating enough on paper, but piling it up in person you start to feel like the little storage space at your feet on the plane will implode into a black hole singularity. (On international flights the airlines tend to install video control boxes under many of the seats too.) We pulled out all of our gear and marked the checklist and stuffed each item into our large duffle bags. We sorted through what we had, and found that our checklist still had a long way to go.