May 17 – The Trekking Team is Enjoying Namche

Today Richard, Katherine, Min and I went up to the National Park Overlook, 10 minutes walk above the Panaroma Lodge in Namche where we are staying.  Our view of Everest showed the weather to still be quite bad up there. We are sure all our friends at Base Camp who are waiting to try to summit in the next two weeks will still be holding at Base, or at least Camp II for a bit.            

Meanwhile, down here in Namche, life is good.  We went quickly down to the Khumbu Lodge Internet Cafe this morning.  Dan was the first online I believe.  You might think that we would all be most eager for world news, or messages from home.  But in fact settling a days-old dispute about a "Scrabble" word that Katherine used during one our numerous evening Scrabble games in the lodges along the Everest Trail was the first order of business. Katherine used the word 'fauvist' and claimed to remember from an art history course that it was a word used to describe a post impressionist art movement.  She was not believed until we checked dictionary.com and saw the word listed with just the definition that Katherine had claimed. 

Later we met at one of our favourite places to eat in Namche:  The Khumbu Lodge restaurant.  We enjoyed my favourite "Yak Sizzlers".  Some of the group ordered "Chicken Sizzlers" instead.  Garv commented that we should all be getting "Crow Sizzlers" due to the fact that we were "eating crow" for giving Katherine so much grief throughout many days of trekking for her scrabble word choice.

We miss Shelley, Brad and Ang Temba and trust they are doing well at Chunkung tonight.  Tomorrow we are heading down to Phakding along the Dudh Kosi River.  We will spend another night at our lodge there along the river banks.