Accidental Tourism: Life Beyond Business Travel

Subways, taxis, and public transit offer their own challenges. Finding useful information is a city-by-city sleuthing project. Fortunately, organizations like Easter Seals have initiatives like Project Action working for public transit access in the US (http://projectaction.easterseals.com/sit... ) and Access Exchange International http://www.calact.org/news/newsltrs/art2... working globally. (** Address below)

Where to eat?

Start by checking Wired on Wheels! ( http://www.wiredonwheels.org/ ) WOW! Review US restaurants for accessibility. I'm hoping for internationalization of their project to make it even more useful.

Where you'll go next?

The logic of this outline suggests only one destination as your next stop. Call it what you wish - toilet, lavatory, water closet, loo, restroom - it's there on every itinerary.

Rasha Kawar has the right idea. Her petition for accessible airline bathrooms brings more fresh air to this topic than a truckload of air fresheners. This nine-year-old activist with cerebral palsy has a lot of support for an idea whose time is overdue. (http://www.rollingrains.com/archives/000... )

But there is definitely something that tickles the wordsmith in me about Scope's "Free 2 Pee" campaign in he UK. (http://www.free2pee.org.uk/pages/news.asp ) Talk about fighting for basic human rights!

Wouldn't it be nice to check your laptop and find Richard Thompson's database on accessibility, the Good Access Guide (http://www.goodaccessguide.co.uk/ ), and find relief? Or whip out your Palm Pilot and use GIS to zip over to the WC using the California Foundation for Independent Living Center's Can I Get In (CIGI) software? (http://www.canigetin.org )

Free 2 Pee (http://www.free2pee.org.uk/ ). I wonder if the name will have the same alliteration and poetry when it gets translated to French?

Then again, maybe I should work on arranging for a business trip to France so I can find out for myself.

* Access Exchange International at 112 San Pablo Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127, telephone (415) 661-6355, fax (415) 661-1543, or e-mail to globalride-sf@att.net.

** From Candy Harrington citing the 2000 US Census:

According to a report titled "Americans With Disabilities, 1997:

" based on the Survey of Income and Program Participation, among people 15 and over in 1997: (out of the 47.9 million people with a disability -- 25 million had difficulty walking a quarter mile or climbing a flight of 10 stairs, or used an ambulatory aid, such as a wheelchair (2.2 million) or a cane, crutches or a walker (6.4 million).

(Yes, that's a can you see in the author's hand. Good spotting! For the background story see Beans Around the World at http://www.beans-around-the-world.com/. You'll have to wait

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