Rolling My Way Through Europe
By: Sara Krahel
Tags: Disability, Friendship, Travel, Cerebral Palsy, Wheelchair

Four years later, I was back in Europe on a trip to Barcelona and Paris with one of my good friends, Tanja. After a lot of planning and talking it over with my parents, I decided to bring my rigid manual wheelchair (this means it does not fold) because it has footrests and my current foldable manual wheelchair does not. Thanks, Nameless Major Airline, for breaking it.

Internally, I was nervous to go on this trip with just my friends. To anyone who asked, I acted like it was no big deal to jet off to Barcelona and Paris. Yet, I kept having flashbacks to my last trip in Europe and how stressful it was at times to handle the inaccessibility of a giant city I wasn’t familiar with. I was with my family then, they are used to changing plans last minute because I can’t get into an attraction or choosing mainstream tourist spots to go to since those are most likely to be wheelchair accessible. If I am with my family, I know that when something goes wrong I will have four other people immediately stepping in and fixing it with me. I know that my friends will jump in and handle any inaccessible situation that happens. But I just don’t like having to rely on them in that way. Truthfully, I don’t enjoy having to rely on anyone because of my disability and take pride that in most scenarios I am able to take care of myself. Slowly, I am learning to accept that there are just some situations where I need a little help.

I am well aware of what people might be giving up when traveling with me. I can’t go on intense hikes, ride bikes through a city, or easily get onto a beach. I have to plan ahead, or at least be prepared for obstacles to get in my way before being able to enjoy whatever it is I’m doing. But, I have known Tanja for most of my life and have known the girls we were meeting up with for years. I just hoped that we all understood what we were getting into when we planned this trip abroad.

To my utter surprise, the first few days of our trip went by without any issues. Tanja and I went on walking tours of Barcelona, shopped in the Gothic Quarter, and drank lots of sangria. There were a few moments of having to take a slightly different route on the walking tours to avoid stairs, but our tour guide handled these few directional changes with ease.

Our problems began when we traveled for a fourteen-hour day in Paris. Ambitious for two 20-something women regardless of their abilities, I know. I won’t get into every detail of how inaccessible the buses were, or how NOTHING in Paris is close to anything else. What I will get into is how, as we were exiting the Eiffel Tower tour after our very long and exhausting day in Paris, one of my front wheels tilted off the hinges, rendering me essentially immobile. It happened just as we were about to catch our flight back to Barcelona.

Immediately, Tanja and I saw that a screw had popped out of the front wheel. If we could find the screw, then we would be able to put it back in and resume our journey — except nothing in my life is ever that simple. It was in this moment that I wished for my mom to be there with me. Whenever something breaks on my chair and she’s around she goes into “fix-it” mode and automatically has eight different solutions to fix whatever the problem may be. And now I couldn’t even call her to have her brainstorm solutions with me. It was just me, Tanja, and my broken wheelchair.

After five minutes of scouring the gravel around us, I wondered if it had fallen off just before we left the Eiffel Tower. We carefully went over to the guard and tried to explain what happened by pantomiming the situation we were in. The fact that we don’t speak French and he didn’t speak English did not help matters. Now, I laugh at the image of Tanja and I simultaneously attempting to show a screw falling out of my wheel with extreme gestures, thinking in our panic that he would be able to understand us. Thank god one of the vendors selling touristy gifts noticed we were having trouble communicating and helped us translate to the guard. At last he understood our dilemma and let Tanja go in. I stayed back, moving inches at a time, to look around me for anything that might be a screw.

The entire time I was waiting for Tanja I was trying not to panic, but couldn’t help thinking: If we can’t find this screw, then how will I make it to the airport? How will I even make it on the plane and shuttle back to the Barcelona city center and then manage to push myself another ten minutes back to our hotel? What am I going to do the next four days in Barcelona without a working wheelchair? Just sit inside at the hotel and drink?!

At the same time, I was channeling my inner Mom and thinking of solutions. That’s when I remembered that I had a tiny screw in my backpack that had come off of my chair earlier in the trip. This happens somewhat often with older wheelchairs, and I’ve learned just to keep any screw with me until I figure out where it’s supposed to go. I knew this screw definitely wasn’t the kind that keeps a wheel on, but why not give it a shot?

When Tanja came back with no screw, I said to her with a laugh, “Remember that screw we found the other day? Let’s try that!”

There were no benches for me to sit on while fixing the chair; for a few minutes I was trying to keep myself in the wheelie position and help Tanja as we laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation we were in. Luckily, the same vendor who translated for us came over and held up my wheelchair as Tanja used my travel set of Allen wrenches to put the screw into my wheel. By some miracle, the screw was the right width and actually stayed in the wheel when I did a few test rolls around the park. Even though I was still panicking a bit because of the rest of the traveling we had to do that day, I knew this was the best it was going to be until we could find some sort of hardware store in the morning.

After a pretty typical airport experience, plane ride, and shuttle back to Barcelona we made it safely back to the hotel. I couldn’t sleep without taking stock of my wheelchair. When I took off my seat cushion to see the bare bones of my chair I was shocked to find that one of the metal pieces that secures the seat cushion onto the frame was almost cracked in half. Yet another issue I had to handle in the morning. It’s not like we were in the middle of American suburbia, where Home Depots and Lowes are everywhere. I was in Spain; I barely spoke the language. Where the hell was I going to find a hardware store?!

I woke up excited the next day because we were going to meet up with our friend Kate and her girlfriend, Mariel! And then I saw my wheelchair next to me and the reality of the situation flooded back. In my exhausted state before going to bed, I had texted them what had happened now that I finally had Wi-Fi and asked them to meet us at our hotel after lunch. I also had texted my parents and let them know what happened. My mom told me that she wished she was with me to help me fix it, but that she knew I would be able to handle this on my own. I teared up at that text since all I wanted was for her to be with me too. But that gave me the confidence boost to push forward with figuring out what my next moves were.

Before getting up, I did a quick search on my phone and looked up how to say hardware store (ferretería), screw (tornillo), zip ties (cinto de plástico), and wheelchair (silla de ruedas) in Spanish. Now that I had some new Spanish knowledge, I found a ferretería only six minutes away. I figured if I could make it through all of the traveling last night, I could make it another six minutes on the cobblestones of the Gothic Quarter to get to the store. I was worried about my seat breaking even further, so I used a few of my hair ties to wind around the broken metal piece and the frame of my wheelchair as a quick fix. One thing you get good at as someone who uses a wheelchair is being innovative with the ways you can keep your wheelchair moving.

Pushing myself around the streets of Spain.

Even though I flinched at every bump in the cobblestones, Mariel stopped me every so often to keep the tiny screw aligned with the broken wheel. Kate and I were animatedly talking about the nightmare of a day we had in Paris because she knows I need to talk things out to mentally process it and Tanja took care of navigating us to the hardware store. As this was all happening, I paused for a second and was so grateful for my friends. They set aside their morning to help me through this setback. They all knew exactly what to do to make me not go into complete panic mode and not feel like a burden to them or their enjoyment of the trip.

Somehow we arrived at the store without any mishaps to the chair. Luckily, Kate and Mariel had been traveling in Europe all spring and knew a bit more Spanish than Tanja and I did. The shop owner sort of understood what we were asking for, but it took a lot of gesturing to get him to understand what we were trying to say with cinto de plástico. After we gathered all the necessary tools, I hopped out of my chair onto a staircase in the shop and my friends became my own personal pit crew.

This scenario felt like the set up of a dad joke: “How fast does it take an engineer, a nurse, a writer, and a biologist to fix a busted wheelchair in Spain?” We giggled at the sight of ourselves: three women taking up most of the walking space in this tiny hardware store surrounding an empty wheelchair, and then me sitting on a staircase directing them as to how they might best fix it. There was some cursing, maneuvering, and a lot of opinions, but eventually it was fixed! The punchline? It takes seven laughter-filled minutes to fix a wheelchair.