Crowds

One thing I have not allowed myself to do since my accident is to get into large crowds. I have been to the movies and to the opera but not to sporting events or street fairs. Last weekend I was offered a pair of tickets to a Husky (UW) football game. Clearly it was time to deal with crowds,
The first issue is parking. Being handicapped allows you to get a good choice of parking but no parking is really close to the stadium. The closest lot is a couple of blocks away. We decided to arrive early and to park by the hospital which has tons of handicapped parking and a lot we have used in the past where the rout was well known. While expensive parking was not a real challenge. The crowds were serious but not terrible and it proved easy to move with the crowd into the stadium. The field is below street level with the main walkway about two fifths up the stands. Handicapped seating was on a wide platform at the main level with wheelchair spaces and folding chairs for companions. About 2/3 of the handicapped spaces were filled with folks in wheelchairs. We were originally seated at the end of the field but once the stadium filled were allowed to move to about the 30 yard line.
It was a great game - the teams were evenly matched, the lead changed hands several times and at no time was the difference between the score more than ten points. In the three minutes Cal got the ball. They were 8 points behind and thus needed a touchdown and a two point conversion to tie the game . With under a minute to go they got to the five yard line first and goal. For four plays the Huskies managed to hold and ended up winning the game in the last seconds.
Getting out of the stadium proved to be a much greater challenge than getting in. Even after waiting for over 20 minutes before trying to exit, there were huge crowds. We struggle to move  into a lane where we had a curb cut to get onto and then out of the street. The biggest barrier was a sidewalk on the way to the hospital jammed with people waiting to board buses. I rolled half on the sidewalk, half over the flowers in the garden, all the time asking folks to get out of the way. One time I accidentally rolled over a man's foot. At one time we took a path through the garden believing it would lead to the hospital without forcing us to go up stairs. I could see that there were no stairs heading up. What I did not see until we got to the top was the stairs heading down that everyone else took, The door to the hospital was locked and we ended up heading back to the crowds on the sidewalk.  Eventually we got to the hospital and our car and decided that we can handle crowds.