While taking a summer course in Tibetan Culture at the university, Lynn, an attractive widow with two grown sons, meets Peter Hampton, a good-looking younger widower with two teen-age daughters. The only non-traditional students in the class, they are glad of each other's company. While becoming fast friends, Lynn learns that Peter's mother is helping to raise his daughters.

By the end of the course, Lynn realizes that if their relationship becomes serious, the age difference might be a problem. But she has fallen in love with Peter which makes it difficult to decide what to do.

Hearing of a late October, ten-day tour from Kathmandu, Nepal to Lhasa, Tibet, she thinks it would be ideal for thinking objectively about Peter, without daily reminders of him and how much she cares. She asks her cousin, Jennifer, to go with her, but doesn't tell the real reason for the trip, saying only that this was the opportunity she had wanted for years.

With great excitement and anticipation, they and eight other passengers from the United States leave Kathmandu in a bus, driven by a Chinese. To their surprise, the tour leader is not Dawa, the tour company owner, but Yangji, his wife, an inexperienced Sherpa. For reasons he doesn't explain, Dawa was not able to lead them at the last minute.

As they proceed to Lhasa, it becomes more and more apparent that the tour has been misrepresented. Instead of the first-class accommodations they paid for, the overnight stops were dreadful, and the food almost inedible. High passes added to their difficulties, granted the mountains would be there even if their bus were the kind promised them. But driving in a forty-year-old Chinese public carrier that leaked the cold and dust from the Gobi desert, was not what they siged up for. And Jennifer became ill.

As if that weren't enough, the frequent, unexplained appearances of two Chinese haunted them all the way.

From coping with this on-going nightmare, Lynn learns to know herself better, and thus make a decision.