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Traveling with a disability in Europe By Reid Davenport, E-mail the writer http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/traveling-with-a-disability-in-europe/2013/07/25/0dc6ecea-c3f7-11e2-8c3b-0b5e9247e8ca_story.html Isat in the underground train exhausted, wondering how long it would be before we got to our stop. There was no announcement coming from the overhead speakers, but a man’s voice saying “Mind the gap” rang in my ears. My friend Pat was sitting next to me, holding my collapsible wheelchair in place. “I was right,” I said to him. “Europe is not accessible.” Traveling with a disability in Europe Travel Guide 2013 I was visiting Pat and two other American friends studying in England. As we made our way to downtown London, Pat had to carry my wheelchair up and down flights of stairs at various tube stations because most of the elevators were out of service. Because there were no ramps, I was constantly forced to get up from my chair at various points to mount a step or more. And the 18-inch gap between the train cars and the platform made me wonder how British residents in electric wheelchairs manage to get around. It was something I’d been wondering about for a while. I’ve used an electric wheelchair since my freshman year at George Washington University. I have cerebral palsy, and although I’m ambulatory, I tire quickly. My whole body is affected by my disability, from my tight legs to my spastic shoulders to my abnormal speech. Still, I’ve lived completely independently since I entered college in 2008. All through my college years (I graduated in May 2012), I’d planned on visiting Italy, my grandmother’s homeland, and studying there. In my junior year, I was accepted into a study abroad program in Florence. It wasn’t until after I was accepted that I disclosed my CP, which prompted a round of phone conversations with the program concerning accommodations. I knew that Europe wasn’t as wheelchair-friendly as the United States, or at least Washington, but I’d never thought that a lack of accessibility would cause a study abroad program to discourage me from participating in it. But the program administrators said that if I brought my electric wheelchair to Florence, they might have trouble finding a host family with an accessible home and would probably have to house me more than a mile from campus. The city’s cobblestoned sidewalks, they said, were very narrow and sometimes had no curb cuts. They suggested that I consider having either a student or an assistant push me in a lightweight manual wheelchair, which would be easier to navigate because the front wheels could pop up if there was no curb cut in the sidewalk. They also said that they were skeptical that the elevators in the program’s buildings were large enough for an electric wheelchair. After these phone calls, it seemed as if going to Florence had the potential to become months of misery. Disappointed, I decided to stay home and watched my friends go abroad without me. Though I knew that the lack of accessibility in Italy didn’t necessarily reflect the situation in all of Europe, I also knew from my limited travel there that accessibility is different from what it is in the United States. My experience visiting Pat revived my interest in shooting a documentary about the subject.