If you get Thanksgiving week off, here’s how much of Nepal you can really trek

Thanksgiving 2026 falls on Thursday 26 November. With that Thursday and Friday off, three days of PTO buy you nine days away, and about six of those in Nepal: enough for Poon Hill, not for anything high. Eight days of PTO buys two weeks and Annapurna Base Camp. Everest Base Camp takes eleven PTO days, because it needs twelve days on the ground plus a buffer for the Lukla flight.

How many days you really get in Nepal

Take two days off whatever window you book: one to get there, and part of one to get home. There is no nonstop flight from the United States to Kathmandu, so every itinerary has one stop, usually in the Gulf or Istanbul. Leave the East Coast on a Saturday evening and you will typically land in Kathmandu on Monday, because the journey is close to a full day and Nepal is ten hours and forty-five minutes ahead of New York. Coming home, the clock works for you: leave Kathmandu on a Saturday and you usually land the same day or on Sunday.

So a Saturday-to-Sunday window gives you Monday to Saturday on the ground. Your first day is jet lag, and the treks in this post all start from Pokhara or Lukla, not Kathmandu, which takes another half-day. Do that arithmetic before you choose a route, not after. Our piece on why flying east to Nepal hits harder covers the first two days in more detail.

Here are the four windows that work around Thanksgiving, assuming your employer gives you both the Thursday and the Friday. Only the Thursday is a federal holiday, so if you work the Friday, add one PTO day to each row.

Nine days off with three days of PTO gets you Poon Hill

With six days on the ground, the right trek is the three-day Poon Hill, which leaves a spare day. Land Monday and sleep. Get to Pokhara on Tuesday; the flight is short and the tourist bus takes most of a day. Walk Wednesday to Friday, then fly back to Kathmandu on Saturday morning and fly home that night. The four-day version fits too, but only if nothing goes wrong, and on a trip this short something usually does: a delayed connection, a lost bag, a cancelled Pokhara flight.

Poon Hill tops out at 3,210m (10,531ft). On a clear late-November morning you watch the sun come up on Dhaulagiri and the Annapurna range from the viewpoint. That is a real Himalayan sunrise on three days of PTO, and I would not try to squeeze more into the week.

The catch is coming home. This window lands you back on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, which in 2025 was the busiest day TSA recorded all year. More on that below.

Fly out on Thanksgiving Day and the airport is nearly empty

Thanksgiving Day itself is the quietest day of the whole holiday period at US airports. On Thanksgiving Day 2025, TSA screened 1,559,165 people, the lowest figure in the ten days around the holiday. Three days later it screened 3,134,613, the most on any day of 2025.

Source: TSA checkpoint travel numbers, 2025. Thanksgiving 2025 was 27 November; the same pattern applies to 2026, one day earlier on the calendar.

If you fly out on Thanksgiving evening, you land on Saturday with eight days in Nepal before you fly home on Saturday 5 December, for five days of PTO. That is exactly the five-day Poon Hill: Pokhara on Sunday, walk Monday to Friday, fly home Saturday. You miss the turkey, but you avoid both airport crushes, and the return lands a week after the busiest Sunday of the year. For every other day, see our breakdown of the quietest days at US airport security.

Two weeks and eight days of PTO gets you Annapurna Base Camp

Thirteen days on the ground is enough for Annapurna Base Camp with a day to spare, and I would pick it over Everest for this window. Land Monday, take the bus to Pokhara on Tuesday, and our nine-day itinerary runs Wednesday 25 November to Thursday 3 December. On that calendar you spend Thanksgiving night at Ghorepani, 2,860m, after the long climb from Tikhedhunga, and you watch the sunrise from Poon Hill the next morning before heading into the Annapurna Sanctuary. You reach Base Camp, 4,130m (13,550ft), on day eight.

The reason I would not squeeze Everest into the same two weeks is Lukla. Our twelve-day Everest trek does fit into thirteen days on paper, but only with no spare day at all, and Lukla is a mountain airstrip where a morning of cloud grounds every flight. On a trip with a fixed return date, that is the wrong risk to take. Annapurna Base Camp starts by road from Pokhara, so weather cannot strand you at the start or the end.

Everest Base Camp over Thanksgiving means eleven days of PTO

To do Everest Base Camp properly around Thanksgiving, you need to be away from Saturday 21 November to Wednesday 9 December. That is twelve walking and flying days, one day to recover from the flight out, and two spare days in Kathmandu in case weather holds up the Lukla flight. It adds up to eleven PTO days, which is most of a year’s leave for a lot of Americans. Our look at how much vacation Americans actually get shows why.

There is also a logistics detail most people miss. Until 30 November 2026, Lukla flights leave from Manthali in Ramechhap, four to five hours’ drive from Kathmandu, starting before dawn, not from Kathmandu airport. On this calendar you fly out on Tuesday 24 November, so the drive to Manthali is part of your first day. Flights from 1 December are due to go back to Kathmandu, but confirm this before you book. The full story is in why autumn Lukla flights leave from Manthali.

If you only have eleven PTO days and Everest is the reason you want to go, do it at another time of year and take a shorter trek over Thanksgiving. If you have the time, late November suits it well: the high trails stay walkable through the month, and the question of whether November is too late only becomes a real one in December. Our head guide’s view on whether Everest suits a first trek is worth reading before you commit.

What late November is like on the trail

Late November brings some of the clearest weather of the year, and cold nights. The monsoon is long over, and Tihar, the last of the autumn festivals, ends on 11 November in 2026, so the October crowds have gone home by the time you arrive. Days on the lower trails are good walking weather. Mornings at Ghorepani and above are cold, and nights at Annapurna Base Camp and in the high Khumbu are well below freezing.

That means a warm sleeping bag and a proper down jacket. I would rent both in Kathmandu or Pokhara rather than buy them for one trip; they cost a fraction of the purchase price and you do not have to carry them across the world. Buy boots, and break them in before you fly.

Our solo prices are in US dollars. International flights are not included.

Book in this order, or the dates fall apart

Confirm your PTO first, then the trek, then the international flights. Book flights first and you end up fitting the trek around a routing, which is how people lose the spare day that makes a short trip work. Tell us which days you can be away and we will tell you which trek fits, including when the honest answer is a shorter one. After that:

• Visa. US citizens get a visa on arrival in Kathmandu: $30 for 15 days covers every window here except the Everest trip, which needs the $50, 30-day visa. Details are on our Nepal visa page for Americans.
• Insurance. Check that it covers trekking to your highest point, including helicopter evacuation. Many policies cap trekking cover at a set altitude, so read that line before you buy.
• Your return. If you are on the nine-day window, try to get home on the Monday instead of the Sunday. It costs one extra PTO day and avoids the busiest day of the travel year.

If you are planning next year’s leave too, our 2027 federal holiday calendar shows which long weekends stretch furthest.