Simon J. Hayhoe - Accessible Vacations

Accessible Vacations

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Accessible Vacations is a problem-solving guide book written to give you an informed choice of the most accessible museums, monuments, and theaters for vacation visits or day trips. It plants the seeds for accessible outings, activities, courses, and exhibitions you may want to try out, as well as places to go see great shows or movies.

Accessible Vacations is not an exhaustive list and wont try to sell you a hotel room or a flight. It also wont tell you about diners in the local area or the best souvenirs. Its written in the hope of making your life easier and more interesting in your leisure time. It also gives you a realistic, accessible picture of whats available in the US when you choose your destinations.

Whether its viewing paintings, watching musicals, or even traveling up tall buildings, you can learn, find pleasure, develop personal interests, and build a life journey in US cities. You just need to know where to go to make these activities possible, and how cultural places can help support elderly people and people with sensory and intellectual access needs.

It is written in honor of your spirit of adventure.

To know how the intimate experiences in this book came about, youve got to understand how my early travels informed it.

My first view of the US coast to coast was from the window of a Greyhound bus.

In 1991, when I was in my early twenties, I had a student internship at a university in Vancouver, Canada. I was short of cash at the time, so I relied on a four-day pass to travel from New York City to Vancouver via Greyhound, crossing the border to Canada just after passing through Seattle and the Puget Sound.

I spent weeks before the trip poring over the Greyhound timetable, a thick book in those days that was like a literary atlas of the US and almost as thick as a local telephone directory. After ploughing through the timetable, I found a passage of travel with minimum stops that would, given luck, take me from East to West seaboards in just under four days. The only downside to this plan was that it would mean starting at New Yorks Port Authority Bus Station at midnight.

For those who didnt know New York back then, in the early 1990s the city wasnt the city it is today. I always think wistfully about those times when I pass through the modern, safer Port Authority and linger to buy a juice or grab a cup of coffee.

In those days, you didnt stop at the Port Authority long if you could help it. As soon as you got into the building, hustlers would try to snatch your bag, pretending to provide you with a cheap service for a small tip. From there, you could be taken down a corridor and held up with a knife or a pistol.

Despite running the gauntlet to get to my bay, a few minutes to midnight I put my bag in the hold of the first bus of the new day and settled into my first sticky bus seat. This and two other Greyhound seats were to be my home for the next three and three-quarter days. I slept often on that trip, but I have rarely felt so tired since.

On the road, I had a completely different experience of the US. The first big city I passed through was Philadelphia, the original grand, industrial city of the country, with its historic buildings and port on the wide Delaware River. Then it was on to Chicago, the giant of the Midwest, all skyscrapers and Great Lakes so long and wide they were more like oceansin those days the Sears Tower was still the tallest skyscraper in the world.

Further into the Midwest, I took a break in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, the twin cities, where I stocked up on provisions. Close to the Greyhound station, I saw a club with the names of bands whod played there on plates around the outside wallPrince (of course) and Motorhead (more of a surprise)which made me promise myself to return one day and take a closer look.

From Minneapolis, I traveled further west, where the cities got smaller and farther apart, like the staging-posts of Bismarck in North Dakota and Miles City in Montana. At first, I thought these places were sets from 1950s Western movies, with ranchers wearing ten-gallon hats and holstered guns.

After the vast Midwest, it was over the Rockies and Cascades by day and night, and then on to the West Coast and Seattle, a surprisingly exciting city surrounded by coastal mountains. This was the first time Id seen the Pacific, which seemed as cold as the Atlantic coast but blue-greener and shimmery.

The houses were different again on this Pacific coastline. More interestingly, the teenagers wore very different, grungier-looking clothes and had wilder hair from those Id known back East.

I learned two things from this journey.

The first thing I learned was that the US has a rich, beautiful history and culture. Its a place of natural exquisiteness and wide-open spaces. It also has exciting cities, big and small, founded on commerce and governments, roads and railways, education and religion.

US cities nurture and attract famous painters, sculptors and actors, philanthropists and writers. They also attract people from all over the world to work and develop new trades, which gives these cities cultural depthLittle Italys and Chinatowns, Korea Towns and French Quarters are now almost as synonymous as skyscrapers and four-lane highways in most of the USs biggest cities.