Pre-Trip: Traveling Gypsies in London
August, 2007
I suppose you can say the idea of travel had been born in my mind as a young teenager. Back then a couple friends sold me on this show they'd been watching on our local PBS station. While I had been consuming myself with tales of the private detectives and big city cops in American cities, my friends had following the adventures of an alien traveler who took his funny caravan anywhere in space or time. The show was called "Doctor Who", a BBC creation, long time British legacy and with a new cult following in my America.
I watched this silly show every weekend imagining what if I to could travel anywhere or anytime. And as the fictional Doctor traveled to the storied history of England, I found myself becoming fascinated with the history of that other distant land. Someday, I promised, I would see for myself what this mother land was like, to walk amongst the centuries old buildings, to dine at a pub and meet the locals, to touch a history that made my country look like a mere child. Alas, when you have a body that makes going to the mall a challenging adventure, traveling to a foreign country is the stuff of fairy tale.
Fast forward half a generation and it seemed that inspiring Doctor would give new life to that childhood dream of mine. You see, just as the BBC show rediscovered itself in a popular new remake, my father discovered he liked it too. When Grandpa Mohawk was on sick leave recuperating from his triple bypass surgery, we watched the new Doctor Who together. This new, hip production brought us sights of today's London. There was the London Eye (that giant ferris wheel over the Thames in the shadow of Parliament), Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Tower of London and even the sparkling high rises of Canary Wharf. I shared my wish to go there and found (to my surprise) GM wanted to as well.
But how would we do it? I had my power chair and GM was not a spry young man anymore. America is very friendly to those of us with physical challenges, but the UK and Europe are newer to the accessibility world. Tours are not made for the disabled in mind, and those that are can cost three times as much. The answer lay in books, the Internet and everyone I could talk to over there. I found the best resource in travel writer Rick Davis' Guide to Accessible Europe. Thanks to our Marriott timeshare and it's ability to trade weeks for hotel points, we could get just about any hotel we wanted in London. British Airways had direct flights from my local airport. I had a cousin living in East London so we wouldn't be entirely without resources if trouble ensued. And I found a travel itinerary from Adventures By Disney for their London & Paris tour.
This was to be our first trip abroad so we decided to keep it conservative. London had more than enough sights to entertain us for 10 days and we knew the language. Though I had two years of high school French, I wouldn't trust my skill when asking where the nearest accessible bathroom was.
So we booked the hotel by phone (a year in advance to ensure we could have the only roll-in shower room) with Marriott. It was to be the London Marriott County Hall, just across Westminster Bridge from Parliament and adjacent to the London Eye. We picked late August because that was to be the warmest time of year for them. We bought our $1000 per person overnight plane tickets out of BWI, made sure our passports were up to date and converted our American dollars to British pounds.
Our American cell phones wouldn't work but we took my little travel laptop and prepared to e-mail and video conference home. (I'm always amazed how much closer the Internet brings us together.)
Our departure flight left Monday, August 20 at 9:05 in the evening and arrived the next morning at 9:25am in London Heathrow.
What follows is our tale of adventure, written to family and friends back home. Enjoy!