New Orleans trip report

Using voice recognition software, this is a longer version of our harrowing weekend trip from Tuscaloosa to New Orleans and back. Our youngest daughter and her boyfriend had to move to New Orleans. She is a senior at Tulane and he is looking for a job. She found a very nice little apartment, which at the beginning of the summer needed extensive renovations. I wouldn't call it done, but it's certainly plenty good for living in and very cute. So we had a rental truck, my wheelchair Van, and a small car, forming a caravan for the pleasant and trouble-free trip down to the city straddling the river. They knew right where the apartment was, having been there before, and the detour to pick up a ramp so that I could get in caused no problems. But then! The 8 foot ramp was actually two skinny eight-foot ramps, the kind used to move freight in and out of trucks. Despite their length, they were way too short for the front door. The front door access is so uneven and crooked that I am not sure any kind of ramp would get me in there. There is a curb cut from the sidewalk to the paved front yard, which is only about 3 feet wide, then there are six or seven steps up to the porch, and the only way it could possibly work would be a ramp stretching from the sidewalk to the porch. It would be long and steep.

Fortunately, there is an alley, and fortunately, it is wide enough, but unfortunately, not at the end. Peeling back the fence isn't a problem, but we had to unscrew and remove the curved bottom segment of the downspout from the gutter. As my daughter's boyfriend remarked (he is confusingly named David), this don't really seem to be necessary anyway. I was able to squeak through to the back yard, and turn around, so that I could behold in all their glory the steep back steps that go up about 4 feet to the kitchen. Remember that my ramp is actually two skinny little half ramps. I can't really see my wheels unless I stop and lean way over, which isn't the best idea on a steep ramp. It was frightening, but I made it.

The apartment has been chronicled elsewhere, the heart pine floors, the 10 foot ceilings, the charmingly differentiated mantles in every room except the kitchen, und so weiter. That was Friday. I didn't go out again, because as anybody who has ever climbed anything knows, down is much harder than up. We had planned to go out to dinner, but it got too late, and that got postponed to Saturday. Take out Chinese from a pretty decent place was an excellent substitute. I got a lot of reading done (“[limit]”, by Frank Schatzing, translated from the German, an excellent science fiction thriller that is more than 1200 pages long). But I digress. Saturday dawned with more unpacking frolics for everybody else and more reading for me. All of the essential work was done in the early evening, made all the more exciting by our realization that two of the four window air conditioners were not working. Not a good time to call the landlord. But it was a good time to get out of the house and go to Magazine Street, where we ate at my daughters favorite New Orleans restaurant (so far): Ignatius. Typical New Orleans food, if slightly yuppified. And I am somewhat surprised to learn that dragon recognizes that as a word. Surprised and pleased. The food was good, and afterwards we strolled around a little bit, looking in shop windows and people watching. We were a little tired for a trip to the Quarter, which we had contemplated. We tried to go to a coffee shop and discovered that they wimp out and close their doors at 9 p.m. Nothing for it to go back home to the ramp.

By the way, in the preceding paragraph I glossed over my adventure going down the ramp to get out of the apartment. I have been using this wheelchair for a long time, but it is difficult to steer at low speeds while going sharply down. If I had gone off the ramp I would probably have cracked my skull and paramedics would have had to come back there to even get me out of the chair. I feared to the left and then to the right, but not quite far enough for disaster. But don't worry folks: there's another chance on Sunday!

Let's spoil the suspense. On Sunday I survived too. It was even closer. I don't actually scare easily, but for a moment I thought I was dead. Before we visit again we are buying a regular 2 ½ foot wide solid metal ramp that is at least 8 feet long. Maybe 10 feet (those cost half again as much as the eight-foot ones).

We got out of town two hours late as a result of waiting in vain for the cops to arrive after a minor fender bender. I was hot, and that isn't good. Finally an elderly mother in the other vehicle got overheated as well. Thank God, though I hope the old lady recovered completely when she got home. Because it meant we could call the police, say never mind, and leave. Just as well. This is New Orleans; they were never coming anyway. Turned out that the elderly mother's daughter is some sort of neighborhood matriarch, and making nice with her for more than an hour on a shady sidewalk might have been the best thing we did all weekend.

Did I mention that the lift on my van stopped working?Repairing that cost as much as a 10 foot ramp. At least I did not get irretrievably stuck, Jaws of life stuck, in 95° weather and 100% humidity more than 200 miles from home. So really we were extraordinarily lucky on this trip. When we come over the hill at the end of the trip and I see that the house isn't a smoldering ruin, I feel extraordinarily lucky every single time. I'm a lucky guy. If I had had my car accident in 2000 instead of 2003, it probably would've killed me. Technology is moving that fast. Okay, now I'm on the verge of getting sappy and so I will stop. Plus, I'm about out of time. Next: Washington, DC, Thanksgiving week, 2013! Be afraid, be very afraid.