Our long-awaited trip to fulfil a number of points on our wish list has finally begun. Having visited Santa Fe once (during Carol's year working in Juarez, Mexico) Jim had a yearning to return to New Mexico. He also wanted to do Route 66. (Imagine Jim on a motorbike and me in a sidecar! I think there would be definite attempts on Jim's part to unhitch the sidecar and continue on his journey uncoupled!) I wanted to see the Grand Canyon to compare it to the Copper Canyon in Mexico which is absolutely mind-blowing. Over 3 years I made several attempts to get consecutive home exchanges that would facilitate our wants. A tentative arrangement in 2013 fell through and there were no bites in 2014. Finally we had to compromise. Jim would have to make do with doing parts of Route 66, not on a Harley but in a car with me navigating, and I would have to content myself that a home exchange in Sedona or even Flagstaff was not going to happen. So we have settled on around 3 weeks in Santa Fe and a similar amount of time in Tucson. Both Santa Fe and Tucson are a long way from the Grand Canyon (in excess of 7 hours ) so we had to come up with a solution to see it without spending a fortune. (Jim frets when he hears my expansive plans and makes many visits to his online banking account, contorts his face alarmingly, scratches his head and despairs!) I finally convinced him that renting a car for 5 days is no more expensive than for 2 days (we had need of a car to get from the first exchange in Santa Fe to the second outside Tucson) and somehow the mathematical genius did not calculate the overnight stays necessitated by doing a road trip! So road trip it is 😀. We would leave Santa Fe a few days earlier than planned, pick up our car at Santa Fe airport and make a trip that includes Mesa Verde, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon and finally make our way to our home exchange location near Tucson.
On the day before leaving for our overnight in Dublin prior to our flight to Chicago I did something strange to my leg resulting in excruciating pain and inability to put my foot to the ground. I knew that even with some improvement the following day I would not be able to negotiate the long walking distances at any of the airports so I phoned Trailfinders to organise wheelchair assistance. American Airlines had a clever way of deterring one from availing of a wheelchair but they didn't succeed. They required my weight which I reluctantly and apologetically whispered down the phone. On arrival at check in the following morning i was ushered to the holding pen until a sturdy enough wheelchair was found to transport me to my gate. A lovely woman became my driver and, with Jim trotting alongside, I was transported through security, pre-clearance where she kindly dictated my answers for the blue card and then through US security. Even in the wheelchair passing through security was not smooth - of course the bleeper sounded as I went through and so I had to be checked. I was spared the indignity suffered on my German trip, where my waistline had been investigated, possibly because I was seated and had indicated the source of my pain. At the US security I was asked to remove my shoes but , from my position in the wheelchair, I was unable to reach my left foot without pain. My wheelchair angel's request that I be allowed to keep them on was granted and the security man satisfied himself by running his scanner along my shoes. We arrived at the relevant gate for our flight to Chicago with loads of time to spare and I couldn't help thinking that being injured when having to take a trip to the US is quite a good thing!
When we arrived in Chicago an airport cart (motorised open top little bus thing) was waiting for me and 3 others in a similar predicament and, with Jim on board also, we were driven to our respective transfer gates. Again it was in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to figure out where we were supposed to go and then to walk there! There followed 7 hours wait for our next flight to Albuquerque but O'Hare in Chicago is a great spot with lots of restaurants and even a spa. In Albuquerque a young man was the wheelchair angel but he had 2 of us to transport at the same time. This he did speedily and efficiently sometimes pushing one and pulling the other and giving a little spin every so often so that I felt that I was on one of the rides at a theme park. He had us on and off lifts in a flash. Jim galloped along beside us but used the escalators to get down to the luggage reclaim area where he was reunited both with our luggage and with me. A quick call to our hotel and the shuttle was on its way and we were settled in our bedroom within a half hour of getting off the plane. A bit of a wnirlwind journey I think!
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