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Vacations

By Amy Halloran

I am very fond of going to the ocean. My parents kindled this fondness in me over campfires at the Burlingame Campground in Rhode Island. My parents took us to many places in Maine and Massachusetts, too, but we loved Rhode Island and the merry-go-round at Watch Hill, fighting the crowds and waves at Misquamiquit, and walking along the beach at Charlestown.

My sisters and I had been planning to take our parents to southern Rhode Island last fall but couldn’t coordinate our schedules. That was lucky, in a way, because when our father had a stroke last September 19^th, one thing we didn’t have to think about was getting a refund on a rental property. This past spring, however, with my father’s condition stabilized, I got an itch to get him to the beach.

Our August trip to the ocean began in April with that terrific tool, Google. I typed in the words “beach wheelchair” and was delighted to find that such a thing existed. Then I got specific, and added the state to the search. Voila! I discovered that Rhode Island, like many other states along the Atlantic shore, had beach chairs available for free at state parks.

Once I found out about the chair that would get my father to the water, I sought help finding accommodations. I guess I didn’t punch in exactly the right words for the search engine, and it took an e-mail to a friend who also uses a wheelchair to help me find an Internet listing that cataloged accommodations on a variety of categories, including accessibility

Once I learned that the situation would be manageable, I had to tackle the task of inviting my parents. I suppose I was hesitant of offending them somehow; I was worried that I was pushing their boundaries.

So I began by quietly asking my father what he thought of the idea. When he agreed, I asked my mother; when she agreed, I asked my siblings.

This required a lot of planning, of course. Getting extended families together is always a challenge. After I secured the dates we all agreed on, the debate began. Should I look for an accessible house with enough beds and bathrooms for all 12 of us? I scoured the rental listings, on-line and in the phone book, for accessible houses, but there weren’t many available. Finally, my parents realized that they would rather have a room to themselves, which made the planning easier.

My father loved to run into the ocean as soon as he saw it, and it was hard for him to have to appreciate the Atlantic from a different position. He found it hard, too, to be in the big-wheeled beach chair the next day; he said that he felt like he was a cartoon on display for everyone on the beach. But once we wheeled him down to the surf, and the waves splashed up over his lap and onto his chest, he found his old delight.

The three days we spent in Rhode Island were not all “a day at the beach.” There was the catastrophic dinner the first night, when we discovered that the restaurant my parents liked to dine in had access only by stairs, and plenty of them. The restaurant we did find was intimately attached to a beach bar, and its classic-rock soundtrack blasted indoors with the ocean breeze. Luckily, the alcohol and food eased tensions and everyone was happy by the time we left.

I felt awful for not doing a better job of researching the eating options, but I learned that you can never do too much research before you leave for a trip. I found that the state published an accessibility guide, which I could have requested by phone, and that the area of the state we chose to stay in had hardly any appropriate eateries. Perhaps we would have chosen another area for our vacationing had I investigated more fully, but maybe not; that first dinner could have been awful in the best of places. We were all so nervous about the adjustments we were about to face that we could have found fault anywhere and everywhere.

Overall, I think we created more good memories, and the surf swallowed some of the burdens of the last year.

*****

Amy Halloran is a writer who lives in Troy. She is working on a novel about urban renewal and a comic book about a neighborhood that was destroyed to accommodate a bridge.

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