Rode my new Rio Dragonfly handcycle around the Hollywood Beach Broadwalk the day after Christmas. Starts at the north end and goes all the down to Margaritaville and back. Lots of holiday decorations and drunknen tourists.
Tag: wheelchair
City Park and NOMA Sculpture Garden, New Orleans
After finishing up at the World War II Museum, I still had energy to do something else. I wanted to see the New Orleans Museum of Art, but it was closing early that day. So instead I visited the recently reopened Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden that is located on the NOMA grounds inside City Park, a huge public park in New Orleans.
I wanted to visit City Park anyway and ride my hand bike around, which is exactly what I did. The park is beautiful and some of the outdoor artwork is amazing. They make great use incorporating the art into the lakes and canals present in City Park.
One night in Panama City Beach
Last week I took a solo road trip from Orlando to New Orleans. I stopped a little over half way through and decided to spend the night in Panama City Beach. I was only there about 12 hours, and only at night, so I didn’t get any actual beach or ocean time. I mostly walked around the pier area, had some food, decompressed from my drive, and worked on my masters degree thesis.
Continue reading “One night in Panama City Beach”Plans for New Orleans and thoughts on AirBNB
I’ve been booking some trips online recently and have struggled finding accessible places to stay that perfectly match my needs. I am being very particular in what I want, but that’s suppose to be part of being someone on vacation with financial means, right? Getting an “accessible room” is not a problem. But in a specific part of town? With the kind of parking I want? So much of modern Uber and AirBNB based tourism is designed to be booked on the fly with the customer expected to be flexible in what they order versus what they actually get. And that’s fine for people who are able to physically travel in any vehicle or stay in any bed. But that’s not how having a disability works.
I’m planning a solo road trip to New Orleans for later this month. Last year around this time I also visited New Orleans and I stayed in an AirBNB for the first time. Our stay turned out great, the room was perfectly accessible as described, parking was free in a garage under the building, and we were right in the middle of everything that we just walked around the city the entire time.
This time around I was looking to stay in a different part of the city. Also the place I stayed last year is already booked. So I started off my search by looking at some regular hotels. I generally stay at IHG hotels (Holiday Inn/Crowne Plaza) and there are lots of them all over New Orleans ranging in price from $120 to well, as how as you want. Lots of swanky options. Well right off the bat I am limited by the parking options. Almost all of the hotels are valet parking exclusive at $50+ per night (plus tax and tip). The price is not a deal breaker, but I am generally not comfortable with strangers driving my adapted vehicle, especially when its my only way home. More importantly, I really want easy access to my truck when I’m in New Orleans. I am bringing my handbike and other adaptive toys with me and I want to be able to quickly switch them in and out. I could drag it all up to my hotel room, but then I’m dealing with a bike up and down in the elevator, and etc.
A few hotels I find do offer self parking at a rate of $40+ per night, but they are all at public parking lots across the street or further from the hotel. I wouldn’t mind parking my truck outside for a few days, but it is not ideal in any situation, but especially not in a bad neighborhood or when New Orleans’ infamous rain storms hit. Of course this parking situation is not a problem unique to disabled people. After all these hotels are in the middle of downtown of a major city, of course parking is going to be restrictive and expensive. I would love to stay at the Intercontinental as it looks classy as heck, but I don’t want to pay 60 dollars a night to have my truck and bike stashed away out of sight. https://www.ihg.com/intercontinental/hotels/us/en/new-orleans/
The attitude these days seems to be that everyone should just take an Uber and forget driving their own vehicle. And I would love to do that! Unfortunately Uber is not an option. First because I am driving in to town with all my gear. But second is because Uber is nowhere near accessible as required by the ADA. The drivers are not trained or experienced to deal with disabled people and the vehicles are not standardized at all. Unless you have a wheelchair that folds up and are physically able to step into a car, Uber is not going to work for you when traveling alone. I’ve used standard taxis before, generally mini vans, and those are bad enough. But at least the drivers expect to get out of their vehicles to help you load up and are happy to do it. Not to mention they are experienced professionals.
I hear that Uber has improved by providing wheelchair accessible vehicles in major cities like New York, Washington DC and London. I’ve also heard service is now available in New Orleans and I look forward to giving it a try. But I can’t risk my entire trip on the hopes of a new service. When it comes to services for disabled people I have a lifetime of experience telling me to be realistic about what is going to happen. There is no just fly in to a city and open up the app and hail a ride. It has to be reserved and confirmed in advance and reconfirmed before you leave. Once again, for a disabled person, there is no other backup. And I’m a rather adaptive and independent young male. Imagine doing this in a power chair or while lugging around a ventilator.
Since a regular hotel wasn’t going to work for me I decided to look for other options. As an example of how having a disability greatly reduces the options available, let’s take a look at AirBnB. I search for a private apartment the week I’m staying with no other restrictions on amenities or price and I get back over 1,000 potential results.
Now I add the barest of accessibility requirements. Four of them to be precise – an entrance without stairs and an entrance, bedroom, and bathroom doorway all wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair. Adding these four requirements drops the availability of rooms from 1000’s to now 7. Only 3 of which are in the area of New Orleans I want to stay.
The first result clearly has an unaccessible bathroom. The doorway looks about 20 inches wide. The second option is rather perfect, but it does not offer parking. Which I message the owner about it she suggests I take an Uber. The third and final option is nice, and they do have a surface parking lot next to the building for $30 per day. And its not valet which is good. However, the owner has not provided any pictures of the bedroom or bathroom doors. I have no way of confirming their width. I could ask the owner for pictures, and then follow up on them to make sure it happens, but now I am giving myself extra work to do for my vacation.
So in the end I’ve decided to go with a Holiday Inn in a good location for me. It has a public surface lot parking right next to it for $25 per day. The room is cheap, half the price of AirBNB, and fully accessible. I don’t have to worry if I’ll be able to get into the bathroom or not and if I have any issues Holiday Inn will have a whole staff there to assist me or modify the room as I need. With AirBNB these days you don’t even meet the owner usually. Most of the units have been contracted out and are handled by a local person making low wages and responsible for turning over a dozen units a day.
I’m going to continue my hotel and AirBNB search in case I find anything better. I have a few weeks until my trip. And I always book things using fully refundable rates for this very reason. Then I can start getting excited about New Orleans and all the things I am going to get to visit that I never had time for before. City Park, the Aquarium of the Americans, The Museum of Death, The World War II Museum. Plus all the usual food, jazz, alcohol, and history. This will be the third year in a row I’m visiting NOLA and I’d like to continue making it a tradition. At least until I can buy some property there.
Cleveland, Ohiooooo
I’m finally getting time to write about my summer trip to Cleveland and Buffalo. I had a marvelous time! I was able to rearrange my trip to drop my rental car off in Buffalo and fly directly home to Orlando. This saved me a lot of time and stress by not having to drive back to Cleveland first and then take an indirect flight home.
I did have some struggles physically boarding my flights. On my way to Cleveland I had to board one of Southwest’s 737-800‘s, their least accessible plane in their fleet. There is a much larger storage area directly to your right as you enter the plane than on other Southwest planes. This makes making a turn in a wheelchair to get close to the seats impossible for me. Instead I had to simply kneel down in front of the front row of seats and then push myself back up into the seat. Next time I will probably have the aisle chair placed in the aisle in front of the front row of seats so I can transfer to the aisle chair and then into my seat directly.
An equally bad complaint about the 737-800 is that the arm rests are completely fixed, even on the middle seat! I had an open middle seat next to me the entire trip but it didn’t matter because my body was going to be crammed into that 17 inch wide seat width. I ended up with bruised hips. This was the only direct flight to Cleveland, but my struggles boarding were worth avoiding an additional layover.
Anyway, once I arrived in Cleveland, everything went very smoothly. I landed around 8:20pm on a Saturday night and the airport was completely dead. I don’t think I saw more than one person, a janitor, in my entire walk from the gate to outside the airport. Every shop was closed. If I hadn’t known better I would have thought it was 2am. There were two rental car shuttles waiting outside the airport as soon as I exited. The shuttles were accessible, but the electric motor on the ramp didn’t work, so the driver had to manually open and close it.
I eventually got my convertible Ford Mustang rental, spent about 15 minutes installing my hand controls, and I was off into the Cleveland night. It had been over 12 years since I last drove in Cleveland, but the streets started coming back to me immediately. I went to my hotel, the same place I had stayed 12 years before, and got my room with no issues. A couple of my Cleveland friends came over late with water and snacks before I eventually fell asleep around midnight.
The next day I went to my friends’ house to meet their cats and then we went for a late lunch at the Rocky River Brewing Company. We had some local brews and I had a corn beef hash Ruben sandwich with potato pancakes instead of rye bread. This was perfect for me because I hate rye bread. It would be the first of many potato based products I would eat while in Cleveland.
After resting a bit we decided to go watch the sunset over Lake Erie. We drove over to Bay Village and found Huntington Beach. You wouldn’t imagine much beach action in Cleveland, but you’d be wrong. The sand was popular with families on a weekday night and there was even some decent surf. The water was only 73 degrees despite the warm summer day. As the sun went down the fireflies came out and started flickering beautifully all around us.
There is very nice accessible parking to directly access the beach. It is a bit hard to find while driving because there is a road that is completely dedicated to providing handicapped parking. Simply look for the sign telling you where to turn to get as close as possible to the beach. I was able to get over the sand with assistance using my regular chair and freewheel. The sand was much denser and more stable than Florida sand making it easier to roll over even without the wide tires of my beach chair.
While everything looks warm, calm and peaceful now, I was told that winter time on Lake Erie is quite different! Cold Cleveland winter temperatures causes the water to become a frozen slush before eventually freezing completely solid. Of course the locals have a tradition of getting in the water every New Years Day. I’d consider it with my full body wet suit. Consider thinking about it at least.
After sunset we went to Mitchell’s Homemade Ice Cream where I had a tin roof sundae (Vanilla Bean ice cream, hot fudge, locally roasted Spanish peanuts, homemade whipped cream, and a Bordeaux cherry). Despite being after 10pm, Mitchell’s was rocking with a great old fashioned ice cream shop atmosphere. The place was packed, people were enjoying their delicious ice cream, the model train circled around the whole place. What a fun place to visit after a hot summer day.
The next day was a rainy morning and my friends had to work, so I went over to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to take some pictures and do a little shopping. The Hall of Fame is right along Lake Erie and is a fun place to walk around even if you don’t want to pay to get inside the exhibits. Right next door is also the Great Lakes Science Center.
After getting some souvenirs (a pen and a lighter for my collections) I went to meet up with my friends at the West Side Market, an amazing indoor marketplace selling every variety of homemade food products.
I had never been to the Market before and it was a bit overwhelming the different offerings. Every kind of Eastern European dish, pierogies, meat pies, fresh seafood, salsas, hummus, fancy French desserts, and ridiculously cheap fresh product. I felt I could eat three meals a day there and never be bored. I had a couple meat & cheese potato pies along with some cinnamon crunch cookies.
After a nap we headed over to Lakewood for dinner. While waiting for a table, we went to a nearby Malley’s Chocolates, a well known chain of candy stores in Cleveland, where we had some chocolate pretzels. There was some struggle finding an accessible entrance as the front door had multiple stairs and there was no sign pointing towards the ramp on the opposite side of the building. But we eventually found it.
For dinner I had possibly the tastiest tacos I’ve ever had in my life at Barrio. It was pouring rain, we had to wait over an hour, we got harassed by local weirdo standup comic Skitzobill, but it was all well worth it because, oh my gosh, those tacos were good. At the table are paper and pencils for you to fill out your custom made taco order. I had two jalapeno lime shrimp soft tacos and one Thai chili tofu soft taco, both with napa slaw, cilantro, caramelized onions, and Bario crack sauce (spicy ranch). I want more now! Damn.
After dinner I drove around Cleveland by myself and reflected on how far I’ve come in the 12 years since I was last there. When I originally went to Cleveland, it not only was the first job I ever had, but was also my first time living on my own. It was quite the leap for me, but looking back now having traveled across the country on my own many times, it all started in Cleveland.
Nawlins
I spent several days early this past April in the city of New Orleans, one of my favorite places in the southern United States. I stayed at an AirBnB for the first time and this was also the first time I was able to explore more of the city outside of the French Quarter and Bourbon street. Since I was visiting with two of my male friends, I was able to get assistance to visit a lot of otherwise inaccessible places. But most of all I ate some of the best meals of my entire life. I legitimately feel like you could eat three meals a day at different restaurants and spend months in New Orleans without getting bored.
Trip to Alcatraz
In late 2016 I took a trip out to the San Francisco Bay area – a real home away from home. I spent two years living in the Bay and wanted to visit a few old friends. The highlight of the trip was getting to go out to Alcatraz Island, home of Alcatraz Prison, and now a United States National Park. Despite some buildings being almost a century old, Alcatraz is amazingly accessible to explore and it was one of my favorite travel adventure yet.
My first 360 degree video
I recently bought a Samsung Gear 360 camera. Got it used off Amazon for under $150. It’s not waterproof like the GoPro’s and the picture quality isn’t as nice, but other than that it’s pretty amazing technology for the price.
To test it out I attached it to a selfie stick and then strapped the selfie stick on to the front of my handcycle. It gives a nice over the head view of everything around me, but it’s not very stable and looks kind of silly. I might try some sort of clamp-on system to improve the stability.
Here’s a short handcycle trip I took around my neighborhood recently. You should be able to pan around as you play the video to see all around me. I even tried it out using my Google Cardboard headset and it looks surprisingly nice even without being formatted for a headset.
Indian River Fishing
Went fishing with my dad in the Indian River near the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge. The area is gorgeous Florida at its finest. Manatees are everywhere you look and the ocean brings and endless variety of fish to catch. I’m not revealing our exact area because its relatively isolated and we’d like to keep it that way 🙂
Rode my handcycle through Hollywood Beach, Florida
Last weekend I visited Hollywood Beach, Florida. I rode my hand-cycle up and down the 3 mile (one direction) beach boardwalk on a gorgeous Saturday morning. I had never visited Hollywood Beach before, but it instantly reminded me of “The Strand” along the beaches of Los Angeles. There’s an endless parade of smoothie stands, beach shops, tiki bars, and smiling, happy people. Also Margarittaville!
There is lots of public parking at the parks that are on both ends of the boardwalk. Best of all, the beaches offer direct access from sidewalk to the sand, with no ramps, dunes or other obstacles to slow someone down. If you watch my video closely you’ll also notice a few blue colored wheelchair accessible mats going out into the sand. I didn’t get a chance to get on the beach as I was tired from my biking, but I will surely return soon.