It's been a while, hasn't it? It appears my last post was back in March,
and though nothing much has changed, much has happened.
Back in May, I had a glorious 8-day vacation in one of my favorite "destination resort" environments
- Amtrak trains. First the Lakeshore Limited to Chicago, then the Southwest Chief to Los Angeles,
and the Coast Starlight to Seattle. Brief pause for one night in a hotel (largely caused by train schedule
issues), then the Empire Builder to Chicago, and once again the Lakeshore Limited back to Syracuse.
Lovely.
The hotel in Seattle (which shall remain nameless) got quite a lecture from me on checking out, largely
concerning their total lack of understanding of what constitutes "handicap accessibility" in a hotel room. When are
designers going to comprehend that a bigger bathroom with grab bars is not all it takes to be accessible? For
example, this allegedly accessible room did not contain a roll-in shower; the shower was inside the bathtub. How in
tarnation is someone in a wheelchair supposed to bathe in there? The bathroom floor was treacherous when wet - marble
is lovely, but it's slippery!
Because it's currently "fashionable" to have unholy tall beds, this room was equipped with a king that
sat at hip height for me. That height is going to make it exceptionally difficult for someone to transfer from a wheelchair
to the bed. It's also incredibly hard for someone with short stubby legs and mobility challenges to get into the bed.
Hotel people, if you're going to insist on those ridiculously high beds, supply a stepstool in the room!
The bed was so incredibly huge that I could barely walk between the foot of it and the desk console
in the room - there is absolutely no way that a wheelchair could have gotten through that narrow space, nor could one have
gotten alongside the bed to enable the user to transfer to the bed.
One of the reasons I'm not naming the specific hotel is that these issues are fairly common to
most of the supposedly "accessible" hotel rooms I've visited in recent years.
Get it together, folks!
Will I stay in that hotel again? Maybe, maybe not.
On a much more pleasant note, I've been wallowing in Regency England the past couple of Monday
evenings. The Ovation network has been airing the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth
and Jennifer Ehle. It's a magnificent period piece, my alltime favorite interpretation of Austen's novel. Unfortunately,
this television watching seems to be rather incompatible with knitting anything more complex than garter stitch . .
.
