The longest flight I've ever been on is to NYC or maybe Portland, Oregon. Somewhere around the 3-4 hour range. Knowing that we had 2 full days of travel ahead of us left me numb - it dampened my excitement and anxiety alike.

Jeremy's mom dropped us off at the OKC airport at 5:30 AM on Friday, October 8. We flew into Newark, NJ where we had an 8 hour layover. The beautiful thing about airports is the people watching. And watch, I did. The time passed and our flight had arrived. We boarded the plane for Delhi, India and I quickly learned that my seat did not recline. Wonderful. And then I quickly learned that the toddlers right behind us hated life and wanted to make sure everyone on that plane knew it - for 13 long hours.

I was so excited when we finally arrived to Delhi. We exited the plane and were escorted to an area of the airport with a few chairs and loungers. A few airline workers gathered our passport and luggage information (written down by hand) and told us to wait an hour for our boarding pass to Kathmandu - from there we could gain access to the rest of the airport for food, magazines and other airport luxuries. We took a seat and waited. And waited. We had quietly gone insane and the waiting had become our whole lives - it felt like all we had because we couldn't imagine what was waiting for us on the other side. 17 hours later we were finally given our boarding passes and access to duty-free shops, food and our excitement for Kathmandu.



This is all we saw of Delhi, India through our small airplane window. We had arranged for a home stay through airbnb for the duration of our very long layover but failed to realize that a transit Visa into India takes weeks and hundreds of dollars to process.





We took flight to Kathmandu and as we were cruising at 30,000 feet we saw mountains peaking through the clouds. The frustration and exhaustion didn't matter anymore. We had arrived.

On October 10, 2010 we landed at the ancient Kathmandu international airport, filled out our Visas (the guy that issued mine laughed at my photo and said "pretty"), made it through customs and fortunately found our checked bag in a sea of backpacks and duffel bags. We were greeted outside the airport by a wall of noise, a red sky and about a million people wanting to give us a ride to wherever we needed to go. We found our way to our guide and made our way through chaos to a quiet van filled with the rest of our trek mates. It was just the still before the storm that was driving through Kathmandu in rush hour traffic - I've never experienced anything like it and was too shocked to pull out my camera. But trust me, when I tell you that it was insane. But we made it to the other side of the world and at that point we didn't want to be anywhere else.

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• everest base camp trek
• nepal


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