I just came back from spending my first weekend wheeling out in public. I wanted to jot down some quick points, before I put together a full report of my trip and post it in a day or three.

1. Wheeling really does make you invisible to most of society. For the most part, you get ignored even when trying to get someone’s attention.
2. As an exception to the above, if you stop wheeling for more than 3 seconds anywhere other than at an intersection, almost every single person passing by will ask if you’re okay, or if you need a push. This even applies if you’re obviously doing something with your hands like switching songs on your iPod or something.
3. I’m glad I thought to take off my push handles before I went out, because I’d have been pushed without people asking if I hadn’t. More than once I heard ‘You don’t have any handles! How do people push you?’.
4. Transit in this city is easier to use (along the main routes I used this past weekend) than I had expected. 5 points to the local transit authority.
5. Not one transit collector asked for any form of payment for transit. Everyone just unlocked the gate and waved me through without asking. I would feel guilty, but I have an unlimited transit card anyway, it’s just weird that nobody ever asked to see it. In the 10 years of transit taking I’ve had on feet/crutches, I’ve never been waved through without showing my card or paying.
6. Elevators being out of service, which are medium inconvienences when I’m using my forearm crutches, are major half-hour-detour inconvienences when you’re wheeling.
7. Streets that you think of as flat when you’re walking, you realize are very very not flat when you’re wheeling.
8. Curb cuts are extremely variable in quality. Some are a nice smooth transition from street to sidewalk, and some… aren’t.
9. Streetcar tracks Suck. The one main scare I had while out was not lifting my front casters off the ground in time, and getting pitched forward in my chair as they got stuck in the streetcar track while trying to cross a road. Luckilly I wasn’t moving that fast, and I didn’t get tossed right out. Shook me up a little, though.
10. What is considered an ‘accessible’ hotel room may bend the definition of the word ‘accessible’.
11. Getting through doors is much easier than I had expected beforehand. This is a good thing, because about 25% of the door opener buttons in the city appear to be malfunctioning/broken.
12. The worst accessibility issues I had while out were while visiting a friend… In a hospital! I find this ironic. The doors to the ‘accessible’ washrooms were too narrow for me to get through.
13. I massively, hugely underestimated how much physical effort this trip would take. I knew it would be hard, but I had no concept of how hard it would actually be. I failed to take into account that when I read other people’s entries about their first trips out, they are usually driving, so wheeling times are broken up by driving times, and they’re not dealing with block after block after block of sidewalks, curb cuts, and hills. I think this is why I ended up underestimating how hard this is at first.
14. Despite the issues I had, the extreme tiredness I’m having now, and the pain I spent last night and tonight in from pushing myself way past my physical limits… That was so worth it. I’m still on the high from it.