The Adventures of Misadventures

Or rather, missed adventures.

As some (hopefully most) of you know, I didn’t make it to Nepal for my Everest Base Camp Trek.

It’s been almost three months since we got the news that we wouldn’t be able to make the trek – in some ways, it’s still a little crushing, but I’ve also accepted the fact that it’s not happening this year. I know in my gut that I will make it there eventually, and our set back was a reminder that my whole list is truly a self-imposed timeline. The goal of creating and living out this life project was to get myself to stop “table-ing” life for later, and to start doing the things I’m dreaming of now.

The last year and a half of planning the trek was the embodiment of that, and even though it wasn’t in the cards for this year, I know I’ll make it happen in the next few years.

I want to give a little background on the events surrounding our cancelled trip, as well as what I’ve been up to in the long four months it’s been since I’ve made a blogpost.

There were issues with this trip long before our flight was cancelled (pretty last minute by the way). Our itinerary had us flying into Kathmandu, where we were to spend a few days being tourists before taking an internal flight into the Himalayas, landing in a village called Lukla. However, we were told about a month and a half prior to our trek that the Kathmandu airport was under construction, and we wouldn’t be able to fly to Lukla from Kathmandu. This meant that we had to cut one of our days in Kathmandu, and drive five hours to a smaller village, where we would take a different flight to Lukla. I was a little unhappy about this turn of events, because I wanted to spend as much time checking out Kathmandu as possible, and the flight to Lukla is very dangerous, so any hitch in the plan made me a little uneasy.

Then, one month before we were supposed to leave, we discovered that Kaysey’s flight had been cancelled. We’re not sure why this happened, but shortly after it was booked, the flight was refunded to her and she no longer had her ticket. We spent what is hands-down the most stressful day of my life chasing after plane tickets, trying to get her on the same flights as me. Stress migraines for days, folks. It took us hours on hours, several calls to several international airlines, and a lot of stress about not getting on the same flights, but eventually we had her on every single flight as me except for one. It was the last leg of our return trip, from Chicago to Minneapolis – we felt that after having travelled together for three weeks, a one hour flight to Chicago was probably ok for us to do separately.

I was getting excited for the trip, and admittedly a little nervous, because one week before we were supposed to leave, Nepal was hit by some crazy storms. I watched the news as reports of the devastation to rural villages came in; folks were flooding to Kathmandu for medical assistance, and the weather was still looking pretty gnarly. I spent Monday through Thursday of the week prior worrying that we would get stuck in Delhi, one of our layover locations, unable to actually get to Nepal because of the poor weather. Our trek’s timing was pretty sensitive – we only had a few days of cushioning on either end, and needed just about every day to actually complete the trek and ensure we’d get back for our return flights. I worried that we’d actually get to Nepal and be stuck in a hotel while storms ravaged outside, unable to take the flight to Lukla because of the weather, and still unable to make our trip happen.

I did not, however, worry that my flight would get cancelled. But that’s exactly what happened on Thursday night. We were in communication from 5 – 9 p.m. with United Airlines, trying to understand what had happened, and why our flights had been cancelled. They eventually told us that due to a Pakistani conflict, airspaces in Southern Asia had been shut down, and there were no flights out to Nepal for the next three weeks, which was the exact length of our trip. After a year and a half of planning, we couldn’t reschedule the trek three weeks later than what we’d been planning, and we’d also intentionally picked our dates in hopes of seeing the expedition teams at Base Camp. Our trekking company told us it was probably a blessing in disguise, as the weather was terrible and would likely have prevented us from completing the trek.

It was utterly devastating. I’m not an emotional person, but I spent most of the following days in tears (weeks tbh), feeling completely lost and uncertain of where to go. I had quite literally built my whole life around that trip, and didn’t know what to do without it. It’s funny – the weeks leading up to our trip, I’d had “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac stuck in my head (mostly because of the “Climbed a mountain and I turned around, and I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills” line). It’s a song I was obsessed with when I was little, and I remember being heartbroken hearing Stevie Nicks singing that she’d built her whole life around someone who wasn’t there anymore. I remember promising myself I’d never do that about anything, and there I was, having built my life around this trek, devastated when it was ripped out from underneath me. There were a lot of things in my life that I had been pushing off because of the trip that I was forced to confront, and doing so all at once was hard. There were a lot of things that I kept telling myself I could get through, because I had my trip to look forward to. I’d have three weeks out in the wilderness to clear my head and breathe easy again, and when that was torn away, I frankly flipped out.

I still had three weeks of PTO scheduled, so I booked a trip to California and Arizona for the third week (blogpost on these adventures coming soon), and got in my car and drove North to see how long it would take me to hit the rest of the State Parks on my list. I made it two days before Minnesota was hit by a crazy snowstorm, and I headed home to stick the weather out in my apartment. Then I got the stomach flu! It was a really exciting time that made me feel like a really successful individual (that is straight up sarcasm).

I tried to pay attention to the goal I added at the beginning of this year – cutting out more time for self care. I started reading, which I haven’t done in quite awhile; I have given myself more grace; and I’ve made a lot of lists, because let’s face it, I’m still Type-A and list-making is arguably cathartic and self-care for me.

Things have slowly been leveling themselves out, and a lot has happened since. I crossed two things off my list (skateboarding with my Dad in California and running a 10K) and have been chipping away at some of the other items. I’ve hit several State Parks, and went on a silent retreat that was exactly what I needed in my life.

I’ll have posts about each of these, but wanted to bring you up to speed on how my trek fell apart and how I picked myself up.

Stay tuned. There’s always more adventure ahead.