Well, it took us TWO trips to San Francisco to get our visas for China, but fortunately on our way to Arizona to attend Allison’s graduation, we were able to pass through San Francisco both on the way down and on the way back. The Chinese Consulate requires that one submit one’s passport in person (oneself or one’s agent) and they offer to mail it back with the visa if you provide the stamped, self-addressed envelope. Problem is that when you select this option, you cannot pay the visa fee with your Visa card — (seems like you should be able to) — you have to pay the $130 x 2 in cash, which we didn’t have with us. Anyway, we now have passports with visas in hand.

Also, we have a draft of an itinerary the first leg of our trip in China, which we’ve posted on our Resources site. According to the countdown counter, we have just 53 days until we leave.

Well, now we face the test: How much can we reduce our luggage for this trip? Given that we will be carrying it around for 18 weeks, the less we have the better. Generally, this is a difficult area for me. I have a kind of Boy Scout “Be Prepared for any Eventuality” mentality and it often ends up that I’m carrying a much heavier bag than is necessary. After all, it’s possible to find the essentials almost anywhere in the world.

I remember reading that when Mother Teresa traveled, she never took ANY luggage! Of course, I don’t expect Cynthia and I will have anywhere near the retinue that followed Mother Teresa, but still, it’s a good lesson to remember about feeling sufficient and letting the universe provide. My more modest goal is to pack everything into a 44-liter Lookout daypack from REI.

Tempting as it was to bring along a telescope for the solar eclipse, I resisted that and settled for a pair of binoculars and a #14 welder’s glass. Also, no scuba diving equipment on this trip. See? I really have made progress toward traveling with less.

Due a fortunate set of circumstances, a 42 lb bag of our cold weather gear has been delivered to Kathmandu. What a relief! Our sleeping bags, boots, warm coats, gloves, and hats, etc will be ready to pick up there when we need them.

Our friend Sarita decided to make a trip back to Nepal to visit family and generously agreed to take along an extra bag. So we packed up the things we won’t need during our travels in warmer climes and sent them with Sarita to be stored at her sister’s home in Kathmandu.

Now we can travel with carry-on bags only and still have what we need for mountain trekking in Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet.

Yay!! Thank you, Sarita!

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Well, putting on the hiking boots and getting out into the woods is the best way to find out how the body will respond to the challenges of trekking. So Cynthia and I set out on a day hike to Mt. Si, near North Bend, just off I-90, about 45 minutes outside of Seattle. This time of year, the Mt Si trail can get pretty crowded, but on this cool drizzly day in mid-week, there were plenty of parking spaces and we just came across a few fellow hikers.

We took it quite slowly, so we could monitor how Cynthia’s new hip functions on mountain trails.

Well, the hip did quite well; amazingly well, actually. We didn’t have time to go the entire 4 miles to the summit, since we had an appointment for our Chinese lesson in Bellevue at 3:00 pm so we turned around after going about 2 miles up the trail.

But after we got back to the car, it was obvious that Cynthia’s knee was having some issues. Some pain and swelling started developing right away. We stopped at a service station restroom to change our clothes and pick up some ibuprufen at the Handy Mart.

Why was the knee acting up? Could it have anything to do with the fact that this was the first day of Cynthia’s typhoid medication regimen? Or was the two miles down the mountain trial just a bit too much? Too early to say, but this isn’t boding well for long-distance Himalayan mountain trekking.

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It’s 2:00am and I just woke up to take a pee. Then I started thinking about the process I have just yesterday set in motion — a trip to the remote NW region of Nepal and a trek into Tibet to Mt Kailash.

It suddenly took on a feeling of reality when our son Julian responded to my inquiry as to whether he might like to join us. His enthusiasm is marvelous, but it also makes me realize that I have started a chain of events that may very well lead to.a challenging, or shall we say, scary experience. After all, this is a route that gets up to about 18,000 feet and where there are plenty of real dangers of exposure in an extremely remote part of the world.

What is it that brings me to do things like this?

Especially as my body starts to show signs of aging. An adventure like this is certainly not “necessary”. So why expose oneself to risks like this?

When I got Julian’s reply, I was delighted that our son might be joining us. But it also is quite sobering to realize that we are moving from the purely speculative planning stages into the reality of boots on the ground, facing a distant mountain vista and asking ourselves, what have we got ourselves into now?

Time to go back to bed; maybe having written this, I can get back to sleep.

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Here we are in the AT&T store purchasing a memory card that we can use in our digital camera for taking pictures and then inserting it in our Blackberry to upload photos to this blog. This is the first photo taken with our Panasonic Lumix camera that we successfully uploaded from the Blackberry Bold 9000. No computer was needed!

During our travels, I’ll be using a Blackberry Bold 9000 to post journal entries and photos to this blog, abidingnowhere.blogspot.com

For details, see Blogging with a Blackberry on our Resources site.

Sure is handy having this bluetooth external keyboard (Freedom External Keyboard) so that I can touch type the way I am accustomed, rather than trying to learn how to type with my thumbs!

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It’s time for us to return to Asia. We want to spend time in China, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Thailand, so we’ve set aside four months and bought round trip tickets to Shanghai, leaving July 16 and returning November 19.

It’s been 25 years since we visited Beijing with our four-month old son Julian in 1984. David gave lectures at Beijing Normal University on uses of computers in education (when the most popular machine was a Digital VAX 750).

This trip feels a bit like a Buddhist pilgrimage; there are several temples and monasteries in China that are important in the history of Zen. We’d like to find some of the quiet places in China where we can sit with the patriarchs.

We’ve always wanted to go to Lhasa and explore Tibet. This time, we hope to do a walk around Mt. Kailash in Western Tibet.

We will be returning to Nepal where David had served as a Peace Corps volunteer 1971-73 and where our family had returned to visit David’s village in 1995. We have lots of friends, including former students and teachers at Buddha Padma High School in Taulihawa, though we discovered in 1995 that sometimes it was a bit hard to recognize former students who had now grown up and had children of their own.

The trip to Bhutan will be our first — the combination of remoteness and a beneficent king has resulted in a fascinating country.

Finally, we would like to explore parts of Thailand outside of Bangkok. Maybe we will get to visit one of the forest monasteries and we’re hoping to relax on the beach before returning to Seattle.