Adventures traveling

Until I went to a conference last fall I had ne real idea how travel on in a wheelchair worked. I had read that you notified the airlines that you were traveling with a wheelchair and that special arrangements would be made. We did all of that. Then there followed a lot of reading.

Wheelchair passengers need to show up early and are boarded before other passengers on the flight. You stay in the wheelchair until you reach the end of the jetway, At that point the gimp is transferred to a smaller chair narrow enough to get down the aisle of the plane. In the meantime, you advised to remove as many removable parts as possible from the chair to give the airline fewer opportunities to lose parts. Ideally, you end up in a seat near the front of the plane (less distance to travel) and next to the window (you certainly cannot move to let a passenger closer to the window get up.

At the end of the flight, the airline makes sure your wheelchair is at the end of the jetway when you leave the plane after all of the other passengers have exited. On my first flights to Cincinnati, that is exactly the way the system worked,

We next took a trip for pleasure to visit my brother in law in Florida – same idea – same drill. The first flight was from Seattle to Huston. We got to Huston and there was no wheelchair. At this point we remembered the warnings we had read about the glitches that might arise – the wheelchair might be delivered to baggage claim (so how do you get there??) or worse – one person described how the wheelchair was found out at the curb – as someone else might have gotten into a car or taxi.

Needless to say, Verna read them the riot act. After some time the airline rounded up people who had helped unload the plane. One young man remembered a woman who insisted that MY wheelchair was the one the airline had ordered for her and piut herself in the chair (minus cushion or armrests) and had him wheel her from concourse C to a flight on concourse E. He then left the chair at concourse E.

Fortunately we had a good deal of time to make the connection and even more fortunately the chair remained where he left it. After that Verna made sure to get off as early as possible and stand next to the chair to guard against a repeat incident. Does the world need a Lo-Jack system for wheelchairs.

Before we travel again I will have a sign made:

This Wheelchair is the Personal Property

of Steve Lewis

It is NOT the chair the airline ordered for you!!!