“We don’t want any
adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water.”

— Bilbo Baggins’
response to Gandalf’s proposed adventure in J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT.

It’s so much easier to
stay home, whether home is a hobbit-hole in Middle-earth or a
wheelchair-accessible, voice-controlled, single-story house in the city. Nevertheless, Kim and
I occasionally feel the urge to venture forth into the disabled-unfriendly
world beyond, orcs and goblins be damned.

Kim’s eBay business, her side job,
turned a sweet profit in 2016, so we’re going on a cruise. The only other cruise we’ve been on was 7 years ago (photos below).

The logistics of a vacation like this are daunting.
Here are a few issues we’ve had to deal with during the planning stages:

• Finding a wheelchair accessible cabin on a cruise
  ship. This is not difficult, but does limit our choices.
• Figuring out how, in said cabin, I will get from
  wheelchair to bed and from wheelchair to shower, among other places.
• Deciding whether to fly to Florida one day before
  cruise departure or take our chances and fly the morning of. Having an extra
  day is safer, but requires us to spend another night in a hotel, which is a lot
  of work for us.
• Finding airline seats with arms that lift so I can
  slide into the seat from the aisle.
• Finding a good cushion for me to sit on during the
  flight. Because I am unable to adjust my position, long flights can be terribly
  uncomfortable.
• Deciding how many and which wheelchairs to bring and
  which one to transfer from at the mouth of the airplane. How will I accomplish
  the transfer, how do we pack the wheelchair, and which wheelchair attachments
  do we bring on the plane?
• How will I get from the airport to the cruise ship?
• What if it snows on the East Coast?
  
• How many days’ worth of extra medications should I
  bring, in the unlikely event we have trouble returning home because of airline
  delays, or worse, because we’re floating around the Gulf of Mexico in a
  disabled cruise ship where everyone is puking and the toilets are clogged for a
  week?
• At each port of call, what are the wheelchair
  accessible excursions available to me?

What have we not thought of?

What will go wrong? It will be something, and it will
probably be something we never anticipated.

Are we crazy for even attempting this?

You can bet that I’ll answer all these questions and
more when we get home from our adventure (if we get home).

Note to criminals who can’t
believe their good fortune in me announcing that my house is available for burglary: my house is not available for burglary. We have
house and dog sitters, and you don’t want to mess with my dog, Phoebe. That
would be akin to waking a sleeping Dragon.

Trivia question: what
was the name of the sleeping Dragon in The Hobbit, and what was the name of the
mountain where he slept?

Double bonus trivia
question: who were the armies in the battle of 5 armies?