Doug’s World

Back home

I just caught an empty glass that Fish’s tail had knocked off the shelf above my desk. There’s only one place that happens …

I’m home in Seattle now, and feeling better after a long night’s sleep in my own bed. Of course, when I got up at 10AM Thailand time it seems to be 8PM around here. Oh well, that’s easy to fix.

The experience of getting wheelchaired through various airports was interesting and varied. Mom, I’m so glad you insisted.

In Phuket and Bangkok, I had smiling alert young men who handled every detail of the security procedures quickly and carefully, and they handled my computer and camera bags so that I just had to sit in the chair and enjoy the ride. After those two, I was seriously thinking “faking an injury would be a great way to have a hassle-free airport experience every time.”

Then in Narita (Japan) I got a little woman who was very sweet and eager to please, but so tiny that she had to go get help to push me up the ramp away from the plane. And she was clumsy — she smashed my extended foot into objects twice, and there were several other times I avoided the collision myself. And she couldn’t pull my luggage while pushing the chair, so I had my laptop bag and big Domke camera bag piled on top of my lap at all times. Missed photo op there.

It’s surely not the wheelchair driver’s fault, but at Narita it seemed that I was subject to much MORE scrutiny at the terminal and gate security checkpoints because I was in a wheelchair. They not only did the trace-explosives test on my laptop, but also on my removable disk drive, camera, each lens, and even my Nikon flash unit (after removing it from its carrying case). They removed every little thing, and asked me questions like whether both of my lens-cleaning cloths were for the camera.

In Portland, I scored a friendly grandmotherly type who was strong enough to handle my checked luggage through customs and re-check it to Seattle, in addition to the other chores I demanded. (I’ve carefully worded that sentence to allow its best use out of context.) She had the longest stroll by far, across the Portland airport from one end to the other.

Taking off from Portland, I shot some photos with my Samsung Blackjack. I sometimes forget about that as an option, and in bright light it does OK. The pictures it takes are nothing like the quality shots you get with a digital SLR, but good enough for some things:

Here are a couple more shots from the camera phone today, on the final flight into Seattle and in the Sea-Tac parking garage, where Megan found me a hat lying on the ground:

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 9:41 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.