Chapter 5: Learning How

I’d love to be a tall, slim, elegant, rich person cutting an awe-inspiring swath through an expensive hotel lobby, carrying only my tiny purse and a pair of kid gloves, followed by a cadre of devoted bellboys hefting my dozens of pieces of perfectly matched luggage, met by a smiling hotel manager as he exclaims joyfully, “Oh, we’re so happy to see you again, Ms Davies. What can we do for you?”

Such people expect help to be offered, and appear to be born knowing how to accept it graciously.

But how many of us want to be plump, gray-haired grannies being pushed in wheelchairs at airports?

Mumble, grumble.

Nevertheless, I’ve been there, when my feet are so sore I can’t walk another inch lest I burst into tears of pain and frustration. Yes, I can get myself down the jet-way from the gate, onto the plane, and from there to my seat, but I now know I can’t handle the miles and endless miles of hallways and escalators eventually leading out of the airport.

In addition to the adventures engineered by my still-athletic husband, I've taken many trips alone to visit my parents, so I’m familiar with my usual airports. My Air Canada and Aeroplan online-profiles both say “assistance at terminal” but, when my plane lands in Calgary, I ask which gate we’re using before I leave the plane, so I know how much walking is involved. If I can get to the next stage of my journey by myself, I’ll do it.

YVR in Vancouver, BC, however, has been too big for years, and is much too big since they enlarged it to cope with the 2010 Olympics.

At the end of a day of travel, it can be tough to get from my plane to the baggage-claim area in time to meet the family member designated Auntie Kay’s driver du jour. So I happily accept a ride to the elevator on one of those cute golf-cart gizmos, beep-beeping through the crowds. But being pushed in a wheelchair? In Vancouver? Where someone—someone who knows me—might see me?

I dunno.

A wheelchair at London Heathrow is essential, though. I’ve seen entire cities smaller than LHR. But I was once very surprised to be among a group of disembarking passengers whisked off the plane and onto a large scissor-lift built for baggage. We reached the ground safe and sound, but very confused. From there, all of us, with our wheelchairs, were manhandled into a bus for a high-speed unguided tour through the bowels of Heathrow, after which I found myself on a slightly-less-speedy wheelchair ride through long corridors, past desks full of airport personnel. As we zipped by each desk, one of the airport employees would call out, “Are you Kay? Your husband has been looking for you.”

Really, the poor man had no idea where they’d taken me, plus no idea where he was going to catch our flight to Barcelona. He did manage to arrive at the departure gate ahead of us, but when the wheelchair attendant delivered me, Dick was the very picture of a man who didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved. Still, I suspect he was actually happy to see me after his long, worried walk through unknown territory.

In large but considerably less overwhelming airports, where he can walk right beside my wheelchair, he is particularly happy. My carry-on luggage gets piled on top of me, so Dick only has to worry about his own bags – and the people who push wheelchairs know all the airport shortcuts. We get to the next gate or to the baggage claim far faster than if we had slogged along on foot, having to stop in order for me to rest every 50 yards.

STOPPING TO REST

A major big deal, for unfitties who travel, is the frequency of pit-stops. Whether stops for the use of facilities, for resting poor aching legs and diabetic feet, or perhaps just for breathing, they’re of utmost importance to the unfit traveler.

However, they aren’t always located where we want them to be.

It’s hard to remedy the placement of facilities in airports or elsewhere, but feet can be refreshed momentarily when we just sit down.

But sit where? we wonder.

Good question. That’s why I have a chair thing, which folds down into a cane, or maybe you’d call it a cane that opens up into a chair. One or the other. Not exactly a push-button massaging recliner chair, but it’s something on which to sit when the only other choice is the floor or the ground, because if I get down there, I might never get up again.

I now have my second folding cane/chair gizmo, and I outfitted it with heavy-duty rubber feet—all three of them. Yep, only three legs. It isn’t elegant nor, to tell the truth, is it wildly comfortable, but it sure beats the alternative. Practice using one in the store before you buy it, and again at home before you embark on an adventure, but by all means get one.

Some stores offer a sling-style folding travel chair with a heavy fabric seat. It may not be quite as much use cane-wise, but it certainly looks more comfortable for sitting. I’ve seen one being used by a friend, and meant to ask if I could try it out, but I forgot. So try them both, if you can.

My chair/cane was a lifesaver in the Galapagos.

1. New Orleans, LA, USA
2. Edinburgh, UK
3. Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, Ecuador
4. Barcelona, Spain
5. Quito, Ecuador
6. San Felipe, Mexico
7. Oxford, UK
8. San Diego, CA, USA
9. Key West, FL, USA
10. White Rock, British Columbia, Canada

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CHAPTER 3—THE MORAL OF THE STORY

Photos by Richard Schear and Kay Davies, Costa Rica, 2007

The moral of this story should be immediately clear, but in case you’re having one of those days when the obvious doesn’t jump out at you (I have lots of those days), let me state the moral right up front.

It is better to go than not to go.

Enlarging upon that unpretty little sentence: If someone offers you a travel opportunity, you may regret it if you don’t go, but you aren’t likely to regret it if you do go. It still doesn’t roll trippingly off the tongue, does it? So you might want to make it easier for yourself by borrowing a well-known phrase from The Bard: “To be or not to be?”

Because, really, that is the question.

When my husband, flush from his successful exploration (within the boundaries set for tourists) of Charles Darwin’s eye-opening Galapagos Islands, suddenly announced he wanted to go on a wilderness adventure trip to Costa Rica, I suggested he go without me.

“You’ll have more fun if I’m not there to slow you down,” I reasoned. “Go ahead,” I insisted, “I don’t mind.”

“I don’t want to go without you,” he replied.

Aww, that’s sweet. Many a husband would agree, then promptly make a reservation for himself, or decide to take his son instead. My husband only has daughters, and he didn’t immediately suggest taking one of them. Neither did I (more on this subject in another chapter).

“I really don’t want to go if you don’t,” he repeated, “but, you know, they have monkeys.” (Pause while that sinks in.)

“And they have sloths.”

Well, now, sloths I can relate to. Big time.

MY ANSWER

So I had my own answer. I knew I would regret staying home and never seeing sloths.

This, then, is part of the moral of the story. If you’d regret missing the Louvre when you had the chance; if you’d hate yourself forever for saying no to the Northern Lights; if you’d cry because you never saw dolphins – then don’t miss the opportunity when it is offered.

If the opportunity doesn't arise, it’s different. If I never get a chance to go to Olduvai Gorge to see where the Leakeys found the bones of some of the oldest known hominids, I know I can live with reading about it in books. But if I'm offered a camera safari, and I know there’s a way for me to make the trip, yet I still simper and say, “I don’t want to slow you down,” then I may regret it.

Regret is something we all want to live without, isn’t it? Disappointment we can handle; pain and sorrow await us all; but regret is something we can avoid by the way we respond to life’s opportunities.

OKAY, I’LL DO IT, BUT HOW? AND WHAT IF…?

Right. Good questions. I asked myself those same questions many times, and learned the answers through experience, both good and bad.

So, like the man (okay, person) who says he (or she) has found a way to make four million dollars in one year without resorting to pyramid schemes, I want to share my hard-won knowledge with you. Not because my way will be perfect for all unfitties of all genders, but because it worked for me – sometimes well, and sometimes, well, not so well.

And it’s been fun.

As Dick likes to point out to me every time he finds a new adventure on which to embark: By the time I get home I’m always glad I went. Ask me at 30,000 feet over one of the major oceans if I’m happy I squeezed my portly self into an uncomfortable airplane seat for nine hours and I’m apt to snarl in reply; but get me home, fed, rested, and within hobbling distance of my very own bathroom, and I’ll admit I’m glad I went.

Give me six months, then I’ll be acting as if the whole thing were my idea to begin with. I’ll be giving slide shows for my church group, explaining the history and geography of faraway places, and I’ll have completely forgotten I didn’t want to go in the first place. True fact.

Kay visits Giant Pandas in San Diego

Dick and I went to San Diego for the finals of the first World Baseball Championship, which we both enjoyed. We even met people who recognized our Medicine Hat Blue Jays baseball caps. I insisted we also have "Kay's Day at the Zoo" because I'd fallen in love with the San Diego Zoo's Giant Pandas via their panda cam. We saw Su Lin (my second panda cam cub) 'way up in a tree, and her mother, Bai Yun, down below with her back to the crowd. However, daddy Gao Gao is a real ham, and he put on quite an act for us, rolling on his back and flirting upside down with the lady tourists.

Because the Unfittie's Guide is All About Travel...

Photos by my husband, Richard Schear, our China trip, July 2008.

CHAPTER 2 — FROM THE AUTHOR

This is a true story. It more or less has a beginning and an end, but it isn’t a novel and it doesn’t have a plot. It happened to me. The ‘I’ in the book is me, Kay Davies, a former workaholic and now a government-registered unfittie; the ‘he’ in the book is my husband Richard Schear, a senior who can still run fast enough to referee high school basketball and football.
Being away from home isn’t a new idea to me. My parents spent some 25 winters in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, as well as many summers traveling and camping while my father gathered material and took thousands of 35mm color transparencies for his books about the rivers of British Columbia.
So travel isn’t new to me, either. When I was younger, I thought nothing of flying from the west coast of Canada to the east coast of the US for a long weekend, or catching a flight to southern California to rent a car and pop down the Baja to visit my parents for a week. I once took a year off to play rather than work, and during that year I took my brother to Australia for a month.
But the time came when it all stopped. Not just running foot races with my youngest brother. That went first, of course, because he got faster as I got slower. But my pick-up-and-take-off lifestyle eventually stopped, too.
I didn’t relinquish my wanderlust willingly, but relinquish it I finally did, because I could no longer work. I could no longer guarantee I’d show up on the job every day, or produce any significant amount of work once I got there. When I was thoroughly beaten down, the government ended up giving me money every month to make up for my general uselessness and lack of reliability.

KAY’S COLLECTION OF ILLNESSES
For a while (for too long, in fact) I fought my fate. I denied it even as I railed against it, and refused to apply for a pension until several different pains and problems in various parts of my body had me pretty much licked. I tried to work, but couldn’t, so I had to sell my house and live on the proceeds. Then I gave up, applied to the feds, and had to wait for my application to be approved. I moved myself and my two cats to a drier climate, but the medication prescribed for one illness had caused more damage to my already beleaguered body. My eyes developed cataracts, my blood sugar went wonky, my bones got terrifyingly thin, and I got fat. I swelled up like a balloon, and I’ve never lost that steroid weight.
I did, however, lose my looks. Sometimes I still wonder which I miss most, a successful career in the newspaper and printing industry, or a pretty face and a slim body.
It’s a tough call.
Newspaper compositors are being replaced by computers every day, and on the other hand, it doesn’t much matter if old ladies aren’t pretty. Dick thinks I’m cute, which is probably why I married him. However, it is a compliment about which I’m ambivalent. Most of the time, I am glad he thinks so, until I remember I’m a cute old lady, not a cute young thing. Sigh.
So, where was I? Ah, yes, I relinquished my lifestyle, moved away from the wet west coast, and some years later settled into semi-domesticity (I’m no one’s idea of a housewife) out here on the prairie, where the deer and the antelope play. I could book a seat-sale flight, or Dick would drive me out to BC to check on my elderly parents a couple of times a year. I’d see other members of the family, visit a few old friends, get some good fish and chips, and it was enough. I was content.
“There are penguins in the Galapagos Islands,” said Dick.
We’ve been traveling ever since.

Watch for these and other topics coming soon

WHAT'S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN?

WHAT COULD BE WORSE THAN THAT?

WONDERFUL THINGS FOR UNFITTIES TO DO

I wasn't the only one who had problems sometimes

Dick got a little confused by a hammock at our hotel in the Galapagos Islands. What to do next?

Stay tuned for these and more...

Stay tuned to upcoming chapters of An Unfittie's Guide to Adventurous Travel. Learn more than you ever wanted to know about unfitties, and all you need to know about such things as transportation...

and accommodation.

CHAPTER 1 - TO THE READER

Okay, so you’re not as young as you used to be. You have pains in places where you didn’t used to have places, and you suspect your weight in pounds far exceeds your height in centimeters, although you’ve never been mathematically inclined and never mastered the metric system. The math part won’t matter anyway, unless you want to explore countries where everything is metric.

But you really don’t want to explore anything much any more.

You no longer imagine yourself walking the Left Bank of the Seine because you can’t even walk to the bank where your passport molders in a safe deposit box. You don’t imagine yourself sipping anything stronger than ginger ale, or maybe going wild with a diet cola on New Year’s Eve, and you no longer wish you were part of the crowd in Times Square. You don’t want to stay up to watch the ball drop. You’re happy if you live in the west and can watch it drop at nine or ten, when it’s already midnight in New York, so you can go to bed with a heating pad.

You’d walk to the library if you thought you could carry all those books. You’d walk to the coffee place you love so much, just to hang out for a while, if you thought you wouldn’t have to ask someone for a ride home. “Maybe I can get there, but I don’t know if I can get back!” has become your new mantra.

Can this really be you? How did you get to be an unfittie?

You remember when you could work full-time plus overtime, do your own housework and laundry, serve on a couple of committees, attend a few meetings, and go dancing every week.

You remember when you were 34 and could outrun a soccer-playing 13-year-old in a hundred-yard dash, although you realize you couldn’t have held out for a longer distance, even then. Maybe it was a sign, but you were too triumphant to notice it.

Triumphant, oh yes, you were, and you were all kinds of other good things, too. You were still young in your 30s – you were bright, productive, resourceful, excited and exciting. Members of the opposite sex still turned to look when you passed, and you still appreciated it. Hey, you still expected it.

You don’t know when you became invisible. When your hair first started graying, you thought it quite chic. Rather than dye it to conceal the gray, you dyed the gray parts purple, to match your favorite outfits. You certainly weren’t invisible then.

Nor were you invisible in your early 40s. You could still turn a head now and then, but nobody called you ‘cute’ any more. Instead, they said ‘good-looking’ or ‘charming’ or, if they loved you very much, ‘gorgeous’.

In your 40s, you fondly remembered the plans of your youth, when you wanted to change the world. You never quite accomplished it, but, in your 40s, you still thought there was time. The wild excitement of civil rights issues and women’s issues had, perhaps, given way to more subtle environmental causes, but you could still get pretty wrought-up about saving whales, pandas, or your local river.

Now you’re a confirmed recycler, if your spouse will bundle up the papers and plastics and cans and take them away. You want to save the polar bears, and those endangered penguin species, but you aren’t sure you could travel to the North or South Pole to see them.

You aren’t even sure you want to travel at all any more.

Home is nice.

Then, one day, you casually ask your spouse, just as a point of interest to see if you’re still soulmates, and not as a suggestion at all: “If you could go anywhere in the whole world, where would you want to go?”

Much to your surprise, he waves a brochure at you and declares, without hesitation or doubt, “Here!”

It’s from his university alumni association. They’re arranging a trip to the Galapagos Islands.

It doesn’t dawn on you right away – you’re not the quick study you once were – but life, as you’ve grown to know it, is over.

Samples coming here first

Because my husband always says, "I don't want to go without you," I have found myself in some surprising places over the past few years, and I've seen more than a few amazing things. It hasn't been easy for me, but I have come to believe it is better to go than to stay at home. In other words, I won't regret going, but I might regret not going.

Watch this blog for samples of how I coped with pain, fatigue and adventurous travel.

Coming some day to a bookstore near you

Dick snorkels with sea lions

My large and healthy husband has been dragging me around the world by the scruff of my neck for several years now. When he presents me with an exotic destination and an exciting itinerary, I usually demur, suggesting he should, perhaps, go without me so I don't slow him down. But he always talks me into going.

Therefore, I'm writing a book about it, in the form of a series of humorous essays, and I'm beginning to see an end to the writing.

"An Unfittie's Guide to Adventurous Travel" is not so much a travel guide as it is a study of emotions and attitudes that might be keeping us from traveling, because emotions and attitudes stop us far more often than mere physical difficulties could ever do.