Trekking to base camp

I have decided to give up my super deluxe room here in Kathmandu and start trekking out to base camp to meet up with Domhnall....maybe offer to carry his pack back......no probably not as that would make him too fast for me to keep up!!!
I will leave for Lukla in the morning, and trek hopefully to Namche by tomorrow night.  I am not too sure how long it will take me to get to base camp, but hopefully I am there to great Domhnall as he comes back down.  The plan for now is that he will start going up tomorrow and try to summit in the window on the 25th or 26th.  Plans are of course fluid depending on the weather and how he is feeling and the condition of the mountain.
I will be using the SPOT the next few days as I trek in so follow that.  

 This is a picture of me down in base camp enjoying the luxuries.  A chair with a back, padded seat and of course all the food we could eat.  The boys that cooked and cared for us at base camp were the best.  They provided us with delicious food to keep us going, and when we were up on the mountain they would dig out our tents!

 Above is a view from camp one looking down towards base camp.  There is a faint trail on the far left, but it is difficult to see.  My sister commented that in all of the pictures we have a beautiful sky.  That is because when the snow and wind would come we were too cold to take any pictures!  So I don't have any pictures where the weather is bad....like it was every day, every day starting as early as noon or as late as 2pm.  It would then snow the entire afternoon, evening and night, stopping usually as early as 6am or as late as 8-9am when the sun would shine and it would be unbearably hot.....then a few hours later it would start to blow. 

 This is a picture of Domhnall resting.....yes once in a while he does stop, but not very often nor for very long!  We were on our way to camp two on this day, but we had had a lot of snow the day before and we (he) was concerned about the slopes on the way to camp two.  Concerned that they would avalanche.  It was about 10am and we knew that it would cloud over soon, and that would be good as it would solidify the snow on the slopes.  So we went as high as we dared, then waited for the clouds.  We only waited here about 30 minutes before the coolness solidified everything and we could head up.  I didn't get all the way to camp two when we turned around because there was too much snow to make it all the way.  Only the hearty Polish made it all the way, everyone else turned around.

 View of camp one from above.  On the right you can see the buried tents from the Germans, and right at the bottom of the picture is their snow cave.....collapsed unfortunately.  All that work and they didn't even get to sleep in it!



A picture of us in our snow cave just hours before our oxygenation problem.  I was shaped in a V with our feet in the same spot.  The entrance is between us.  We actually slept here several nights before we had any problems.
A cave is great because thee are all these areas to store things.  At our feet were all the things that we wouldn't need.  Behind the stove is a food storage area.  At our heads and behind our backs were our stuff bags and Domhnall even found a glasses storage place above his head!  It would take a few hours, but once we were settled in the cave would warm up to 0C - plenty warm for us to be comfortable with minimal clothing inside our sleeping bags.