The luxury treatment continued. After the champagne and lemon scented towels at the entrance, the porters grabbed our bags and someone else led us to the check-in desk, where more champagne, and cookies, awaited.

After check-in, we were led to our rooms. I held my breath as we opened the door. I’ve been stuck with a lot of crappy handicapped accessible rooms in the past (mostly in greater New York City), rooms that I didn’t even have space to turn around in. My initial reaction was one of relief. The room was spacious and welcoming: flat screen TV, four poster bed, stocked bar (complimentary). There was a sliding glass door to the ground level, private patio. Nice.

Then we looked in the bathroom. Damn.

The sink was designed so that I couldn’t pull under it in my wheelchair. The toilet was very low (disabled folks like high toilets). There were no grab bars to assist with transferring to the toilet at all. The bathtub/shower was an oval shaped garden style, very tall on the outside and very deep on the inside. The only grab bar in the shower was at the far end such that I couldn’t even reach it. Per my request at the time of booking, they had provided a shower seat.

We studied the situation, scratched our heads, and couldn’t come up with a shower transfer strategy that didn’t involve a high risk of me falling and getting hurt, and getting hurt was not on any of my vacation to-do lists.

I visited the front desk and asked to speak with a manager. As was the case during our entire stay, everyone was very pleasant and appeared to be genuinely interested in solving our problem. The poor room design was not their fault. We were asked to make due with our room for the night, and in the morning, after everyone had checked-in the previous evening, we would be able to see what other rooms were available.

Since I hadn’t showered yet that day, having woken up at 3:00 on a Sunday morning to catch our early flight, I wanted to shower before dinner. I pulled out my slide rule (not really) and we came up with a plan. I would lean my head over into the tub such that Kim could give me a shampoo. I would then sit on the shower seat, outside the shower, and Kim could give me the equivalent of a sponge bath. It wasn’t ideal, but we managed. In the process, I discovered that I very much like sponge baths. I informed Kim that this was how I would be cleaned henceforth, even when we returned to our accessible home. I can’t repeat what she told me.

The next morning we met a member of the hospitality management team, Christina, who would become our personal concierge, of sorts, for the rest of the week. Christina admitted that the resort was woefully negligent in providing real handicapped accessible rooms. She wanted to show us a smaller room that had a traditional bathtub/shower. I had earlier indicated that I could probably manage getting into and out of a traditional bathtub with a shower chair in it.

When we entered the alternate hotel room we noticed that it was definitely smaller, although manageable. But alas, the entrance to the bathroom was too narrow for me to even get the iBot in. It was the only room that she knew of that might be better than what we already had. We were disappointed, and headed back to our hotel room, resigned to making it work somehow.

Later that day, Monday, we bumped into Christina again and she introduced us to her boss, Angella. Angella also apologized for the shortcomings of the room, and told me about how she wanted to compensate us. In this all-inclusive resort not everything was included. The most high-end restaurant sat at the end of a pier and cost $140 per couple to dine. Angella let us know that she had made reservations for the six of us on Thursday night at 8:00, on the house, a $420 value. She also indicated that she would give us a couple of complimentary night’s stay.

Just to be clear, we didn’t go into this adventure confident that the accommodations would be completely accessible, and our enjoyment of the vacation was not contingent upon that. Granted, the bathroom was a huge disappointment.  But, due to our creativity, a good attitude on the part of both us and the local management, and a great team by my side, we didn’t allow these issues to negatively impact our enjoyment of the vacation.

So, how many sponge baths have I received since returning home? What do you think?

Click for next post: Bahamas 2012, #5: Stuff We Did

Click for previous post: Bahamas 2012, #3: Still Getting There

It’s a lot of work to get to Paradise, but we kept making progress…

The boarding of our Baltimore to Nassau flight went well, and 2 1/2 hours later we landed in the sunny Bahamas. In Nassau, the transfer from airline seat to the aisle chair went okay. We were then informed that my iBot would not be brought up to the mouth of the plane because it weighed 290 pounds, and there was no elevator. No elevator? I had to remember, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. So, in the jetway I transferred from the aisle chair to an ugly manual wheelchair, and an airport employee pushed me the long, long way to customs, and then to baggage claim, all with no air conditioning.

When we arrived at baggage claim we handed the exhausted wheelchair pusher some greenbacks and he disappeared. It took us a few, unsettling minutes to find both of my wheelchairs (my babies). I transferred from the manual wheelchair to the iBot, and Kim and Andy began to reassemble my spare wheelchair, including reinstalling the batteries. I asked an employee where the nearest bathroom was and he pointed me to one nearby. I hadn’t emptied my bladder in hours. I went inside the bathroom and found that none of the stalls were wheelchair accessible. I was disappointed but not surprised. The ADA is not an international standard, after all.

I returned to the baggage claim area and saw that my team was making good progress, so I decided to seek out the Sandals desk where we were supposed to check-in for our ride to the resort. I found them, gave them our names, and then asked if there was a bathroom nearby. They pointed me in the general direction of a small food court. I cautiously entered the bathroom and was relieved, literally, when I found a wheelchair accessible stall.

All that remained was a 15 minute ride to the resort. Simple enough, right?

When I was evaluating resorts several months ago, I liked how Sandals provides complementary transportation from the airport. I wondered if that would include wheelchair transportation, and I was informed that it would. Then, later, Sandals told me they had made an error and that I would need to contract a private transportation service, and that fee would be $150 each way. I, of course, did not stand for this and reminded Sandals that I had chosen them in part because their package included transportation from the airport. They eventually agreed, but you can appreciate why I might’ve been a little nervous about the ride that I was about to embark on. As it turned out, I was right to be nervous, but for a different reason.

A very large and kind gentleman named Bubba led us out to the wheelchair van. The lift was already lowered for me, and I drove my iBot on. Bubba picked up the control panel for the lift and pushed the UP button. Nothing happened. For the next five or ten minutes several employees of the transportation company crawled all over the lift trying to figure out why it would not work. Finally, Bubba pulled out a tire iron, inserted it into the lift’s gearbox inside the van, and started manually raising the lift like you would raise a car to change a tire. As I said before, Bubba was a very big man, so I was up and into the van in no time at all. We then disassembled the spare wheelchair into as many pieces as we could, and the employees lifted those pieces into the van. There. It looked like we were finally on our way to the resort. Not so fast.

The driver, who was not Bubba, put the van in gear and pressed his foot on the accelerator. Nothing happened. The driver, and all of us for that matter, made the false assumption that whatever had caused the lift to not operate was also causing the van to not operate. Classic troubleshooting error.

After crawling all over the lift mechanism again, the driver stepped outside of the van and called someone smarter than him. My dear wife, Kim, had been patient all day. She had endured all of our challenges with grace and calm. But this one put her over the top. She looked back at the three of us, me, Andy, and Karen, and let fly some observations, expectations, and ultimatums, all wrapped up in colorful language uncharacteristic of such a lovely lady. Luckily, we were out of earshot of the driver at that moment.

After ending his cell call, the driver sat down in his seat, disengaged the parking brake, and drove us away. The freaking parking break! We all laughed at ourselves and donned smiles that rarely left our faces for the next six days.

The only other odd thing about the trip from Portland, Maine to the Sandals resort was that as soon as we pulled into traffic in Nassau I noticed we were driving on the wrong side of the road. As it turned out, everybody on the island was making the same mistake the very same moment, so no harm done.

When we finally arrived at Sandals, the lift decided to work, and I was lowered to the ground where we were all greeted with chilled champagne and cool, wet face towels with a lemony scent. Here is a picture of Kim applying said towel to my face. That’s Bubba with his back to me. He had followed us all the way over just to make sure everything went well. His level of personal customer service was the rule, not the exception, during our stay in the Bahamas.

What a long day, but worth it!

Click for next post: Bahamas 2012, #4: Settling in at Sandals

Click for previous post: Bahamas 2012, #2: Getting There

I think that there are at least three people living inside of us at all times. There is an anticipating self, imagining the future. There is a remembering self, recalling the past. And of course there is an experiencing self, taking pleasure in, or sometimes merely enduring, the present.

Regarding our recently completed Caribbean vacation, the handoff from anticipating self to experiencing self was announced promptly at 3:00 am on February 19th, by Kim’s shrill alarm clock. Our goal was to get to the ticket counter when it opened at 4:30, for our 6:00 flight. The checklists were checked, the bags packed.

We spent a lot of time at the ticket counter in Portland jumping through hoops to get all of our stuff properly accounted for. Because I had so much disability related equipment in tow, we needed to check three bags instead of only two. I was able to negotiate, without much difficulty, that my iBot, my backup wheelchair, and my third bag would fly for free. The iBot is a wonderful device, but its Achilles’ heel is its poor battery management, hence the backup chair so that I’m not a slave to the bars on the iBot battery strength indicator.

My brother Andy and his wife Karen were flying with us on AirTran, which was a tremendous help. My brother Tom and his wife Diane were flying USAir because, this being school vacation week in Maine, we couldn’t find a block of six affordable tickets on a single airline.

After we had conquered the ticket counter we marched onward to security. Andy, Karen, and Kim passed through their screenings within minutes. Since I can’t go through a metal detector in my wheelchair, I am routinely taken aside for a special pat down. Some disabled travelers are perturbed by this, but I’m not. I’m glad that our airlines are so thorough in this post 9/11 world (in retrospect, it would’ve been nice before 9/11 as well). They used a little wand with special fabric on the end, taking all sorts of swipes on my wheelchair and my shoes and my hands, and ran it through their magic bad stuff detection machine.

Something on my hands set off their machine, so I was taken, with my belongings, to an even more special room for an even more special screening by a higher ranking TSA agent. Throughout this process the agents were very polite and were simply following protocol. I never became frustrated with them, but I began to wonder if arriving only 90 minutes before my flight was cutting it too close. Eventually I was cleared to go, and rejoined my group, which I later found out had decided by a 2 – 1 vote to wait for me instead of making a run for it. Unidentified sources within the group quoted Kim as having plead, “Come on you guys. We’ll never have a better chance to ditch him.”

By the time we got to the gate, they were ready to start pre-boarding the disadvantaged people, and me.

Each time I board or disembark a plane, there are at least two and sometimes three transfers involved. Each one presents its own challenges. When boarding this first plane in Portland, I positioned my iBot near the mouth of the plane at the end of the jetway. Then we initiated a set of highly orchestrated steps which we became more and more adept at accomplishing over the course of the week (4 flights, twice per flight).

I powered down the iBot, and Kim started disconnecting the joystick controller module. We like to take that expensive and fragile item on the plane with us so it doesn’t get damaged by those oh-so-careful baggage handlers. Then I removed the foot pedals so that they too would not be damaged in transit. I handed these off to my sister-in-law, Karen, and she carried them on the plane, placing them in the overhead bin. I then instructed the airport employee who was managing the aisle chair (a special, narrow, wheelchair that can fit down the aisle of an airplane) to place it alongside my iBot, as close as possible, facing in the same direction as my wheelchair.

Then, little by little, I slid off my iBot and on to the aisle chair. Andy moved my feet a few inches every time I moved my butt a few inches. Eventually, the transfer was complete. At that point Kim lowered the seat back on my iBot, putting it in what I fondly refer to as “armadillo mode,” and instructed the baggage handlers on how to set and release the parking brake. Then the iBot was whisked off into the luggage compartment of the plane.

If the gate agent is doing their job correctly, the rest of the passengers are waiting patiently in the terminal while I complete this delicate process. About 50% of the time, however, succumbing to the pressure to stay on schedule, the agent prematurely allows the healthy flyers to start down the jetway so that 20 or 30 people can observe my elaborate boarding dance. I know time is money, but that’s not cool.

Next, I was strapped into the aisle chair with about five different seatbelts. Finally, I was backed into the airplane by an entourage of concerned relatives, airport employees, and airline staff. As we were squeezing down the narrow aisle in the aircraft, inevitably we would drift too far to one side or the other and have to go forward a little bit to reset. Throughout the process everyone had an opinion, including me, so I guess you could characterize this as “boarding by committee.” Eventually I was pulled alongside my assigned seat and my seatbelt leviathan was slain, releasing me from its many-tentacled grip (okay, maybe that’s a bit over dramatic).

Ideally, the armrest on an airline seat should rise up so that I can easily slide into it from the aisle chair. However, on these AirTran flights the armrests were not movable. That made things a little more interesting. I somehow lifted myself up onto the armrest with Kim steering me from the inside and Andy guiding from the aisle. An airport employee anchored the aisle chair, and several other folks tried to figure out, mostly unsuccessfully, how to help (these situations often pull forth the better parts of human nature). I then slid down off the armrest into the seat.

Note to self: moveable armrests used to be a nice-to-have for me, but because of my disease progression I will consider them a must-have going forward.

As soon as I was in my seat the airport employee with the aisle chair shuffled out of the plane so that the thundering horde of passengers could begin funneling in. During the flights themselves, you wouldn’t know I was handicapped unless you recognized me from the gate area, or if perhaps you asked me to stand in the aisle so that you could get to your window seat.

When we arrived in Baltimore, we allowed everyone to exit the plane ahead of us, which is standard procedure. There’s no hurry, since I usually have to wait for my wheelchair to be taken out of the baggage area of the plane and brought up to the jetway. In this case, although we were changing planes to fly to the Bahamas, this particular aircraft was continuing on to Fort Meyers, Florida, and so was my iBot! Eventually, we convinced them to pull the iBot out of the plane and bring it up to me, even though it was improperly tagged for the sunshine State.

It had been a year since I had flown, and I had grown weaker over that period. So, the first time I tried to get myself out of the airplane seat and into the aisle chair, it didn’t work. Our first idea was to have Kim lift on my left shoulder and Andy on my right shoulder. That didn’t work, and I landed back in my airplane seat rather awkwardly, crying out briefly in pain and urgently instructing Kim and Andy to adjust my position. I was embarrassed, but recovered quickly (something I’ve become adept at).

I decided that I would have to figure out a way to rise up out of the seat by myself, which I eventually did. For me, these situations are like solving an engineering problem, something that I did every work day for 23 years. Sometimes I solve these equations satisfactorily; sometimes I don’t. After crunching some numbers with my slide rule (not really) I was able to get up onto the armrest, have Andy move my feet out into the aisle, and then slide down to the aisle chair. After being properly strapped in, I was squeezed down the aisle and out to the jetway, where we reassembled my iBot, and I transferred into it.

From the time I leave my iBot on a departing flight until I am reunited with it upon arrival, I feel somewhat helpless, completely at the mercy of others. But once I plant my butt back in the iBot I become a new person. At these moments my attitude is not all that different from my big-dog-in-a-little-body West Highland Terrier when I let her out first thing in the morning, full of piss and vinegar and ready to take on the world. I just don’t bark as much.

Click for next post: Bahamas 2012, #3 Still Getting There

Click for previous post: Bahamas 2012, #1 Deciding Where to Go

I recently heard something on a Ted talk, which, although obvious, I hadn’t given much thought to before. Your parents leave you too early in life. Your spouse and your own children join you later in life. It’s only your siblings who might be with you for the entire ride, if you’re so fortunate.

It only makes sense, therefore, that my two brothers and I, and our wives, after having lost both our mother and father within a three-year period, would take a portion of our modest inheritance to commune on a tropical beach this winter – just the six of us. The concept of using some of their nest egg for a sibling retreat is something that our parents would have endorsed wholeheartedly. Dad, however, would have preferred that we fish for salmon in a remote region of Alaska or go on an African safari, the kind with guns not just cameras. But we’re not stupid men. We knew better than to even suggest such trips to our wives.

Kim and I thoroughly enjoyed our cruise two years ago, but the group decided to investigate various Caribbean resort options this time. The only problem was that, although there is much information on the relative accessibility of various cruise ships and ports of call, there is disappointingly little information about the relative accessibility of Caribbean resorts. Both our disability travel agent and my favorite disability travel author told us about one Mexican resort that is designed specifically for wheelchair users, but it is a bit small, and one of my sisters-in-law vetoed the whole country of Mexico out of fear of their drug war, so that was out. Her opinion is somewhat justified (click here).

We all agreed that we wanted an adults-only resort, so we started zeroing in on the various Sandals options. Eventually we decided on the Sandals Royal Bahamian, near Nassau, Bahamas. They have one class of room that is considered handicapped accessible, so we booked that room for five nights, and my brothers booked their non-accessible rooms at the same resort.

I’ll be sharing these travel experiences with you in the next few posts, not because I want to make you jealous, but for the following reasons. If you are a healthy person, you might never have been aware of the difficulties associated with disabled travel. This will be eye opening for you. If you are disabled person who is hesitant to travel, you may benefit from hearing how we met our various challenges. This will embolden you (or scare the crap out of you). If you are a seasoned disabled traveler, you might get a few chuckles out of recognizing situations that you, yourself have faced. This will be validating for you.

Here’s the bottom line. To a person, we had the time of our lives, and I’d recommend this vacation to any healthy couples. I’d like to do this again in the future, but unless Sandals makes some changes, it will not be at this particular resort. There were just too many accessibility shortcomings.

Did I mention that we didn’t see a drop of rain in 6 days? Jealous?

Click for next post: Bahamas 2012, #2: Getting There