As we’ve made it from day 1 to day 2 I’m calling this trip a resounding success. We usually don’t have this kind of luck where we’re able to string two days together without a fatality or at least some mishap. I don’t know what we owe our good fortune to but I’m taking it.

As I predicted earlier in the voyage I thought we might lose some of our crew to one thing or another but not this early in the game. Our three resident Sherpas that we brought along to carry really heavy stuff up the sides of high mountains so we could take pictures are gone. There was special knowledge needed on the care and feeding of Sherpas that we should have had, that of course, we didn’t. Apparently Sherpas live in ridiculously high places where there is little or no air. I didn’t know that. And if you bring them down to low places like America a terrible thing happens to them. They get what is commonly called Oxygen Saturation. This is bad for them.

It’s good for us of course, Oxygen Saturation, because we do need air to breathe. They on the other hand being weird, don’t so much. So everything in their strange breathing apparatus gets super soaked with oxygen, their brain swells up to fourteen times it’s original size and their voice gets all squeaky. The only thing you can do at that point is put them on an unpressurized plane and send them back to Nepal with one transfer for Tibet, as the smaller of the three is from Tibet. We have instructed them to let us know when they get back home so we can bill them for the air fare.

I asked our Ethno-Botno-Archeologist ‘ExcuseMeMs’ why she didn’t tell me about this before it got to the critical stage and she said “you didn’t ask.” I’m a little concerned about her. I don’t think Big Lemon likes her. He’s been scratching at his tooth with his butterfly knife whenever he looks at her. We also lost a few of our bearers today. Since we got the handrails installed on the roof of the Bokeh Maru they’ve been riding up there. This morning there were nine up there and when we stopped to take on fuel later in the day two were missing.

Since the other boys don’t or won’t speak English and all we get are shrugs when we ask questions we don’t exactly know what took place up there. If we had unlimited money for fuel we’d go back and see if they were beside the road someplace but we don’t so all we can do is wish them luck. I’ve decided not to put anyone I like up there. I don’t think those boys are trustworthy. One of them had an extra loose gold tooth I hadn’t noticed before. Note to self: check all roof riders for number of gold teeth before and after each days travel.

Today’s image is a quick shot of the Grand Tetons. Tetons is a French word, literally meaning ‘wonderful things’. So Grand Tetons means in English ‘very large wonderful things’. In checking this out to see if it was accurate with ExcuseMeMs she said ‘Yeah sure’ and mumbled something unintelligible as she walked away. We have left the Grand Tetons far behind us and already we are missing them.

Tomorrow is another day and though we are fewer in number than when we started this trek I have high hopes our good fortune will continue. We must work hard tomorrow to make up for time lost so it’s entirely possible there won’t be a post, but you never know.