As the title implies, yesterday was a nightmare day and it seemed that everything was against us until we got to our hotel in Toronto about 10pm.
We began the day by taking a walk around a Central Park finding The Alice in Wondrland Statue for which a group of kids were playing upon and having a death wish when my PAs asked them and their mum to move for a photo, they simply ignored us, people!! As we had time to waste before our flight, we decided to hang round one of the lakes until it was time that we thought that the taxi would pick us up. However when we got back to the hotel at 2pm, we realised that the paperwork says 12 o’clock! The good thing about New York is that because it is a big place there is always wheelchair accessible taxis going past so we just got in one and went to the airport.
Our problems didn’t stop there as when we checked in, they didn’t seem to have any record of my wheelchair hence, like normal, I created a scene as they were worried that the wheelchair wouldn’t fit on the small plane with the possibility of having to transfer us to another airport where there was a larger aircraft. Luckily, they managed to sort something out and everything was fine. You would have thought that JFK being one of the busiest airports in the world would be wheelchair accessible, however, there was still steps to get down to the gate resulting in me having to be escorted by security round the back of the airport to get onto the airfield. when we boarded the plane, there seemed to be no cabin crew on board which is prohibited so I think JFK got into a little trouble for doing it.
The flight only took around 50 minutes after some traffic at either ends, however, when they brought my electric wheelchair up onto the bridge, it seemed not to want to turn on, even after fiddling around with all the cables. As a result one of my PA’s had to push the wheelchair all the way to baggage claim until we could do something about it. Our idea was to find a plug socket to see if the battery would charge but that failed as well. The aireport staff were extremely helpful (but I would say that because I have Canadian cousins) and offered to store the wheelchair until we fly to Chicago on Monday as well as getting a company to look at it. By this time, it was about 9 o’clock so our taxi driver seemed to have gone after the airport person had put a number of calls out so we just decided to jump in a normal taxi as I only had my manual wheelchair, god knows what would had have happened if I had my electric wheelchair!
We finally checked into our hotel around 10 o’clock and had some dinner before bed.
Today we have no real plans so we are probably just going to walk around Toronto.
See you later
Nath 🙂