Page 8 of My Favorite Bad Decision
KIT
DAY 1: LEMOSHO GATE TO MTI MKUBA CAMP
7500 feet to 9200 feet
Iwake the next day on minimal sleep. I’ve always been like this: tell me it’s important to get a good night’s rest and I guarantee you I’ll lie awake, staring at the ceiling until dawn.
I slip on shorts and a T-shirt and go to the reception area for coffee, still dumbfounded that I’m here and actually doing this. All so I can get a view I really don’t care about, a view I could access by googling the phrase “pictures of Mount Kilimanjaro.” In fact, I could getbetterviews. There’s a fifty percent chance the summit will be fogged over when we arrive and we won’t see a freaking thing, anyway.
Dad wants me to do this so I can move on with my life—even if it means moving on with Blake. But this stupid climb is not going to help me get over the past. It’s not going to get me over Rob. Nothing is going to do that.
It’s early enough that the coffee station is empty...aside from Miller.Figures. He hasn’t shaved this morning. It’s an unfairly attractive look on him.Everythingis an unfairly attractive look on him. He’s half Greek, which means he’s always a little tan. The light brown hair and hazel eyes make it stand out even more. It’s the dead of winter, and he looks like he just got back from a Mediterranean cruise. It annoyed the hell out of me that summer in Hamptons, the way I’d spend every day doing my best to get a tan, even if I shouldn’t have, and Miller would turn up after a week working at his dad’s office looking as if he’d been the one on vacation.
Then again, everything about him annoyed me. His loveliness, his smirk, his quick comebacks. His existence.
His gaze drops to the running shorts I slid on to come here. “You’re not planning to wear that, right?”
I roll my eyes. “Says the guy who was wearing a suit yesterday.”
He blows the steam off his coffee. “You’re a little hung up on the suit thing, aren’t you?”
I turn away from him to pour myself a cup. “I’m not hung up on anything but steering clear of you.”
“It’s not too late to back out,” he says quietly.
“Don’t worry about me,” I reply, looking at him over my shoulder. “Worry about yourself.”
“I’dplannedto worry about myself,” he grumbles, walking toward the exit, “and now, apparently, I’ve got to worry about us both.”
I add some milk to the coffee and sigh. At home, I have a very complicated system with expresso shots and protein powder. I miss my system. I miss my rules. I don’t know why my father seems to think my life must be constantly shaken like a snow globe when his is just as regimented, if not more.
And if he thinks I’m not over Rob, allowing me to stay home and plan my wedding to someone else wouldproveI’m over Rob a hell of a lot more than going without a shower and freezing for a week.
I chug the coffee while I pout, then return to the tent and reluctantly open my suitcase.
On the trip up, I will only carry a daypack with snacks, water, and my camera. Everything else will go into a separate porter bag to be carried for me, while my luggage and a few clean outfits will remain in storage here.
I’m torn between the fear that I’ve brought too much and the fear that I’ve brought too little. It would be hard to experience greater variety in weather and temperature than we will endure during this climb, progressing from rainforest to arctic. Rain is guaranteed, as is tropical heat at the start of the climb. Blizzards and dust storms are also entirely possible. It’s eighty degrees here while the summit is currently negative twenty-five.
In other words, I need to pack for pretty much everything, yet somehow keep it under fourteen kilos.
I change into hiking pants, boots, and a T-shirt, followed by gaiters around my boots and the bottom of my pants to keep them relatively mud-free. In my daypack, I stash my rain jacket, water bottles, a few protein bars, and some magnesium salts.
I’ve got every last thing I was told to bring, but I feel wildly unprepared nonetheless.
“How did you sleep, miss?” asks the porter who comes for my bags.
“I’m nervous,” I admit.
“Nervous is good,” he says. “It’s the arrogant ones who fail.”
Miller is arrogant. Unbelievably arrogant. This cheers me up a little—the one silver lining to this whole trip would be watching him turn back halfway through.
Outside, our bus to Lemosho Gate awaits, and is already surrounded by a small group of people way more excited about climbing than I am.
There’s a family of four: Adam and Stacy Arnault, along with their kids, twenty-something Alex and Maddie. There’s me and Miller, obviously—the two solo tents on the expedition—and finally Gerald and Leah, who were on the bus yesterday and who Iassumedwere father and daughter or even grandfather and granddaughter until he grabbed her ass a minute ago.
There are also thirty-two porters. Four porters per person seems like overkill, but a porter has to carry a bag for each of us and whatever he’s bringing for himself, plus there are the tents, food, dishes and cooking supplies.
