Are you spontaneous like me when it comes to adjusting your day’s plans, or your lifetime destiny for that matter? Let me clarify a little; I’m a Space Cadet when it comes to making a plan and I’ve just adapted to being very flexible and minimally invested in setting my itinerary. One December I arranged for some extended time off from work to allow for a far away visit home. I thought I had prepared just sufficiently for my travels by clicking enough buttons on an airline reservation website, and I had shuffled a few official memos around my office to arrange for my absence. Literally the day I was planning to fly out I realized I didn’t actually have an airline reservation at all. I thought it was a little mysterious that my credit card was never charged and I never received any kind of confirmation. To some this might have been a devastating realization and a startling rebuke to take more personal responsibility.

I’ve been reading a number of other blogs on the topic of Trekking Nepal lately. The recent posts are from adventurers who have recently returned from a soggy jaunt through the lowlands of Nepal. They say everything is fine, and oh yeah, there a millions of leeches lining the hiking trails. An image that comes to mind is the giant, oozing creature from “Princess Mononoke” tumbling across the land, leaving a trail of quivering slug slime. Pema tells me that if you’re in the lowlands during the monsoons, the little creatures leap out of the leaves on the ground and say “Hi!” Amy goes further to tell how they were creeping off of the plants and slithering up her boots. You couldn’t pack enough salt to fend them all off and the idea creeps me out bad. Oh, and by the way it’s a condition of rain clouds that you can’t see tall mountains through them, so the net effect is that the monsoon season is not as popular (as what, getting a root canal?).