TravelAbility Insider

The Intersection of Travel and Disability

Adaptive Sports

Conde Nast Magazine announces, “Beyond Barriers” Monthly Column Celebrating Accessible Travel

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photo of a disabled skier on top of the mountain

Tom D Morgan-Courtesy Sophie Morgan

Our Takeaway: In some ways, the UK media is light years ahead of their American counterparts when it comes to inclusive values.  Will others follow?

I would like to share a photograph. In it, a smiling 18-year-old girl wearing a faded sleeveless vest and ragged jeans leans forwards to counterbalance a backpack. She is embarking on her first intrepid adventure, standing on the precipice of a journey, but also of girlhood. She’s at that giddy time when everything seems to offer the promise of potential opportunity. The world is her oyster, and she knows it. When I look at this picture, nostalgia twists gently in my stomach. Then the feeling tightens with foreboding. In just a few weeks, that girl—her wanderlust tickled from a trip around southern India—will be paralyzed in a car crash. Read More.

Is it a Wheelchair or a Tank? It’s Both!

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Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources and the Aimee Copeland Foundation unveiled a fleet of all-terrain power wheelchairs for rent at 11 state parks and outdoor destinations, including Cloudland Canyon. Read more.

Scuba Diving Becomes a Sublime Experience for the Disabled

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Male scuba diver pictured underwater.

Tracy Schmitt, a quadruple amputee and accomplished sailor, skier and mountaineer spent years trying to convince dive instructors to take her on as a client. Tracy said, “They couldn’t imagine: no legs and no left arm, and my right arm is unique with one finger – how would I do it?”

Once she found an instructor, she excelled in the pursuit and is now “an advanced scuba diver approaching my one-hundredth dive,” she said. “The whole world goes silent and your worries just drift away,” she said, adding that “It was the first time I felt like myself again.”

Cody Unser, who developed transverse myelitis (TM), a rare autoimmune condition that left her paralyzed from the waist down at age 12, was introduced to scuba diving by her brother. She experienced an increase in lower-limb sensation while underwater, and took that to her doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Interested in researching this phenomenon more, a team of researchers and a group of veterans with spinal cord injuries traveled to the Cayman Islands for a scuba-diving trip in 2011. According to the news release from Johns Hopkins, the participants had “significant improvement in muscle movement, increased sensitivity to light touch and pinprick on the legs, and large reductions in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms.”

To learn more about the exciting power of Scuba diving, and initiatives to make it more accessible to disabled people, read the article in Stars and Stripes.

Greece Offering Free Swim Lessons for People with Disabilities

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Woman sitting on a swimming pool lift chair with her toes in the water.
Source: Kostas Bakoyannis on Facebook

Children and adults with disabilities can now take free swimming lessons and other training programs in several sports facilities in Athens, Greece. On March 16th, the Greek capital announced that the Athens National Gymnastics Centre I. Fokianos and the municipal swimming pools in Serafeio, Kolokynthos and Grava will welcome disabled people between the ages of 5 and 40 every week from Monday to Saturday.

There, they will find professionals who are skilled at training people with developmental disorders (e.g., autism and down syndrome), neuromuscular disorders, and phobias stemming from past experiences with water. One can opt to participate in the program by themselves or in a group of 2-3 other students.

The Mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis, said the program was an example of a commitment to “lay the foundations for a friendly city, without discrimination and social exclusion.” Bakoyannis continued, “The sports programme in the municipal swimming pools and in the Athens Gymnasium for our fellow citizens with disabilities is another action of the municipal authority that aims to improve their quality of life.”

To read more about this commitment to inclusion, see the full press release from the Mayor of Athens.

Meet ‘Obama the Pony’ Who is Helping Make Glasgow Parks More Accessible

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Man using a wheelchair that is secured to a carriage pulled by a pony.

The English and Scottish countrysides are breathtaking – gorgeous rolling meadows meet grassy hilltops and lead to beautiful beaches. Simon Mulholland, through his Pony Access organization, is working to make Scotland’s public parks and beaches wheelchair accessible through an innovative wheelchair accessible pony-drawn carriage.

He has had a vision of bringing ponies back into mainstream communities since he started building pony-powered vehicles 20 years ago. First trialed in England, he found difficulty in gaining buy-in from the public and local governments. Now, after moving to Scotland, he’s making headway in a community that embraces his vision for pony-driven accessibility.

His vision, he said, “is about access.” He commented, “Oddly enough, this isn’t really a pony activity, it is an accessible activity.”

Mulholland’s pony-drawn carriages open up new vistas to disabled people. In an interview with the Glasgow Times, he remarked, “If somebody wanted to go bird watching or anything, I don’t care, they want to go and do something and they can’t get there. I can get them there and that’s what it is about.”

He emphasized that his pony drawn vehicle is not a “disabled activity” yet an “inclusive activity.” Essentially, it’s an experience that’s open to everyone, with accessibility being a key consideration from the start.

To read more about Pony Access, see the article in the Glasgow Times.