So the fabulous blog YA Highway hosts Road Trip Wednesdays, when they invite all sorts of bloggers to jump in and post about a particular prompt or subject.  Today’s prompt: in honor of the first line of YA Highway’s own Kirsten Hubbard’s new book Like Mandarin* they ask us about a time we did something really wild and crazy.  Oh, young grasshoppers of YA Highway, if only you knew…

Anyway, after much deliberation I decided not to write about going off to Bordeaux to work in a wine factory when I was seventeen; or moving back to Paris when I was 21 to work illegally cleaning houses, babysitting, and teaching English; or about sleeping all night on the side of a gorge in Crete, or even about walking naked through Siasconset in the middle of the night after skinny-dipping in the waves (never mind about that one…).  Instead, I’m writing about the wild and crazy thing that hasn’t happened yet.  In 2012 we are planning to travel – en famille – to Nepal to trek the Khumbu region and see Everest.

During the earlier W-a-C era of my life, also known as pre-kids-and-mortgage, I traveled in Nepal and absolutely adored it.  Oddly it was one of the places I felt most at home, and most connected.  I always assumed I’d go back.  Flash forward fifteen years, and the news is full of stories about this thirteen-year-old kid who has summited Mount Everest.  Not trekked near it, mind you, climbed the bloody thing.** The whole family was transfixed – Small Daughter, Large Son, the Husband, and me.  And for around a week I couldn’t sleep.  Something was really niggling at me, bugging me, stressing me out.  I couldn’t identify it for a while, and finally I realized: I was having a third-life crisis!  I wanted to go back to Nepal!  And now we come to the part of the post where I say really nice things about the Husband.  Because when I woke him to explain this epiphany, and asked if he wanted to plan a month-long trip there in a few years when the kids are a little older and he’s eligible for a mini-sabbatical, his answer was, “yeah, definitely. Why not?” I love that man.

The next day I opened a new bank account and started an automatic deposit that puts a little bit in each pay cycle.  It should be noted that I have not taken similar action for retirement or college funds.  But somehow this felt even more important.

So stay tuned.  Will this wild and crazy thing really happen?  Check back in sometime in November 2012…if I’m not here, I should be on a mountain in Nepal, drinking yak butter tea,  eating dal baat, and smiling my fool head off.

Moonrise over Everest

(photo credit goes to friend and glacier gumshoe Cam Wake.  Thanks Cam!)

*which is coming out soon and sounds fab…go to the website to enter a contest to win an arc of the book

**I have no intention or desire to climb it.  I don’t even mountain climb.  I trek.