Disability travel and other odds and ends

Leave it to the good ol' liberal state of California to make legal what Selina and I have been doing for about two decades now. When traveling, I have had to take her into the men's room. Not a big deal when she was two. But now that she's 20 it's a little squirrelly getting her past the urinals to the handicapped stall. We like Starbucks. Not just for the coffee, but for the fact the stores have private single-seaters.

So we stopped at a California rest stop and saw this sign. That's the first time I had ever seen that, and there was one on the women's room door as well. However, in this case the point was moot because Selina didn't need to go. She has trained herself to hold it all day while her father makes multiple stops.

Most of what we wanted to do on this trip was wheelchair-accessible. Sure, she couldn't take all the trails at the Grand Canyon, but it's pretty, well, grand, so she got to see plenty of it anyway.

There was the guy in Abilene, KS, who complimented me for handling my "burden." He didn't mean anything by it, so I forgot about it. He proved himself to be a good guy when he approached me in the parking lot a few minutes later and apologized.

Selina says the curb cuts in San Francisco were atrocious. She had to lift her footrests in order to use them. When you are in a wheelchair, curb cuts rule your world.

We heard the best radio station in the world in rural Nevada. The announcer was reading the local police blotter word for word. There

was the story of the dog hit by the car, the suspicious car that was never found, the window that was shot out with a bb gun, and the guy running abound a campsite naked and "acting weird."

We've started a new music game in the car. I pick a Broadway show to listen to and she picks a rock album. The only rule is that it has to be an album we don't own. Shout out to Michael Teitelbaum for providing us the power of Spotify to make that possible.

We are in Kingdom City, MO tonight. That is about 100 miles west of St. Louis. Selina says she saw a play at Illinois called "Kingdom City." It was set in this town and was about a New York director who comes to Kingdom City to work as a theater teacher at a majority Christian high school. She liked the play.