And people wonder why I hate travelling

I'm just returning from a conference for work. Traveling is tough these days. Traveling with a wheelchair is an experience. Two incidences happened in the process of trying to return home.

I booked an accessible cab (I can use a regular cab, but it requires folding the chair, and it seems to make many of them uncomfortable, so I will often book an accessible cab) for the to and from trip to the airport. The pickup from the airport went fine, with the exception that she got there when the plane was landing and seemed a bit put out that it took me time to get my stuff and get out to meet her. The plane was supposed to land at 2:10 and I was supposed to meet her at 2:30. She got there at 2:10. The plane landed at 2:20. I was out there by 2:35. I reminded her that I had told her the plane was supposed to land at 2:10, but that I had booked her for 2:30 to avoid issues. Not a problem. Then for the trip back I had booked her for 3:30. It turns out that she had booked two of us for that time, and she can only carry one wheelchair. So no matter what, one of us was going to be running late to get to the airport (the round trip is probably 20 minutes with loading and unloading). And, she was late. Very late. At 25 minutes late I gave up and caught a "regular" cab. I just didn't want to wait anymore, and I was getting nervous about catching my flight. I'm not sure when she actually made it there, but I think double booking and being 25 minutes late is inexcusable.

I won't be using her services again. I will be letting the people putting on the conference know about this.


Second issue: I like flying Southwest generally. With pre-boarding, it works out very well for me in that I always get a seat where I don't have to worry about having my knee bumped. I generally find Southwest to be great when it comes to dealing with people with disabilities. The issue was when I got off the plane during my connection. Generally I am last off, but there were some people who were even slower than me holding up the back of the plane so I had a minute and decided to get off (we were late, which had shortened my connection time). I found my chair wedged between the door and the doorframe of the door off the jetway (where they bring wheelchairs and strollers up).

My first thoughts were panic! Wheelchairs are very strong in the ways that they are designed to take stress, but the weight of a door on the axle sideways is not one of them. It's sort of like rolling up a piece of paper. Pushing on the top of the column, it's actually fairly strong, pushing on the side it will break quickly. Thankfully, there was no damage (well, a scratch to the paint, but nothing major). The excuse I was given was that there wasn't room on the jetway. You would have been proud of me, I didn't yell, I just told him that he should have left it all the way outside, and he better pray he didn't damage it.

Ah, the joys of travel. Sadly, the part of travel I hate most these days is writing the complaint letters afterwards.