With only a month until my departure, I find myself juggling anxiousness and excitement. I use the term anxiousness instead of anxiety because I don't believe what I'm feeling is an unhealthy emotion. I'll explain.
When I originally planned this trip back in 2019, I spent a year conditioning, acquiring gear, and researching everything from immigration policies and pitfalls to local customs and the logistics associated with just getting around in Nepal and Tibet. I was beginning to enjoy a sense of preparedness and confidence until around December/January of 2020 when the COVID plandemic reared its ugly head. I held out hope that the world would come to its senses, but things just got uglier as authoritarian regimes grabbed footholds in their respective countries and their citizens obediently fell in line like cattle heading for slaughter. The trip was officially canceled by February.
Five years have passed.
While I was aware that Nepal and Tibet had reopened their borders in 2023, I was too busy building a homestead and hyper-focused on aligning my finances towards retirement to seriously consider another attempt. Still, I started quietly planning the trip again in the fall of 2024, all the while remaining silent and tempering my emotions; choosing instead to focus on the logistics. The airlines threw several curve balls at me, my job presented its challenges, and my son's wedding fell just four days before the optimal departure date. Now only a month out, the foreseeable hurdles have been cleared and I'm actually allowing myself to get excited.
If excitement is one side of a two-edged sword, then the other side is the fear that the trip experience won't measure up to the hype in my head. My Alaska trip in 2011 absolutely measured up. Months of planning and physical conditioning culminated in my returning home with a triumphant sense of personal accomplishment. I also had a clearer head after weeks of solitude and the introspection that accompanied it. Not so much for my 2016 Australian Outback crossing, during which I sustained mind-numbingly painful injuries only three days into an 18-day ride. I had no choice but to gut it out and ride the 3,000 miles to Fremantle. I do enjoy that piece of accomplishment, but the abject pain I suffered over those 15 days caused me so much despair that when I returned home, I deleted all my notes, photos, and videos from the trip and just put it out of my mind.
