We woke up in the beautiful city of Brussels, looking forward to visiting the Atomium. As I discovered yesterday, the trams are not that wheelchair friendly, so we resorted to taking my manual wheelchair. It was a good job we did! We planned to join the metro at Gare du Midi, which said it was accessible on the map, however we found out that to get to the lift you have to go down the escalator, which doesn’t make any sense… My PA maneuvered my wheelchair onto the escalator, whilst I was crapping myself! But all fine, and there’s some funny pictures to prove it 🙂 In addition, the step up onto the metro was quite big, and I don’t think I would have been able to it on my electric wheelchair.
Anyway, we got off the metro towards the end of one of the lines, to be greeted by the Atomium, which was massive! We decided to go up in the lift to start with up to the top is the only wheelchair accessible part. We then decided to walk up the 320 steps, up and down to explore the individual spheres with help of my PAs. Good exercise for me though! I decided to sit down on one of the escalators, going downwards, which was kind of like the launch of Space Mountain in Disneyland, if you’ve ever been there?
We then decided to go for a wander around and caught the tram back to hotel. Again, the website said that all trams are accessible, which is true, but at some stations there are massive gaps and steps up to the tram. So all in all, it’s not a good way to get around in an electric wheelchair, but fine in a manual.
Tomorrow we head off to Cologne, taking a detour as always, so look out for some more Tweeting.