Rolling Traveler

9:55 am. We’ve reached our crusing altitude, the fasten seat belt sign has been switched off, and the man beside me keeps sucking his teeth. And here’s me without my noise-reduction headphones.

Just as we were leaving the terminal, the five missing passengers for the Turin flight showed up. It was the businessmen who were getting their seats changed when I was in line. They thought it was very funny and said they couldn’t hear the announcement in the VIP lounge, but that it didn’t matter because the plane wasn’t due to take off for 10 minutes.

The aisle on this tiny plane is so narrow that the aisle chair scraped the sides of the seats all the way down to row 10. I think I learned a new word in Turkish when the assistance crew member trapped his hand between the aisle chair and the seat.

They didn’t do a security demonstration on this flight. Now how will I know how to unbuckle my safety belt?

And more importantly, why am I in such a snarky mood this morning?

10:34 am. James Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder is a very good book. The history, even where artistic liberties have been taken, is darkly fascinating, and the plot is rich with unexpected turns. It’s clearing the snark, even though it can be biting in its observations of human nature.

11:08 am. We landed with a small delay, everyone else deplaned and I waited for the aisle chair to be brought on. Copernicus airport in Wroclaw, while still small, has come a long way. It used to just be two hangars and two barracks, one for arrivals and one for departures, now it has a proper terminal building, a few shuttle buses and an observation deck, although people still watch for arriving friends and relatives from the other side of the chain link fence between the tarmac and the car park. I can feel the winter chill in the air, particularly since Dusseldorf was quite warm this morning. I’m glad I remembered my thick gloves.

The aisle chair is new, blue, and almost like a real chair, but it’s an awkward model to carry down the steps of this small plane, as the person carrying the front basically has my knees in his face. The simpler models, though far less comfortable, work better.

As Poland and Germany are part of the area where the border controls were removed under the terms of the Schengen agreement, there’s no passport control anymore, so when I get my bag it’ll be quickly through the terminal building, and out to meet my friend Darek, who’s giving me a ride home. He’s a wheelchair user too, with an SCI, so we’ll need to get help to load my chair into the car, which is not a problem, as the airport staff are trained to help passengers who need assistance from the door of the plane to the door of their car or the bus or whatever.

11:26 am. We’re driving. We just got passed by an army bomb squad vehicle, sirens blaring, which means they’ve found another unexploded bomb from World War II. 63 years over, but they still occasionally find these ‘niewybuchy’ ([nye-vih-BOOhy] ‘unexplodeds’) when construction work is being done.

11:39 am. We’re standing in traffic now, moving about 2 feet a minute. This is the unfortunate side to Wroclaw, especially as it’s the first impression a lot of people get. The economy and population of the city developed far faster than the infrastructure, and the roads are unable to cope with the volume of traffic, not to mention being in a sorry state. Traffic jams are so frequent that sometimes the people who drop me off at the airport to fly back to Dusseldorf don’t get home until after I do.

11:56 am. Ahead is a major intersection with a surface made up of cobblestones, patches of asphalt, old tram lines, new tram lines, and one sweep of tarmac. I’m bracing myself, because this is going to get me right in the lower back. I don’t know how Darek drives here on a regular basis.

12:25 pm. The cats and the pups greet me as enthusiastically as if I’d just brought them home the choicest meat all for them. Morph and Malkavian are all over me in an instant, purring loudly, while Scotty and Shamrock, trained not to jump on or around the wheelchair, shake all over with barely stifled excitement. It’s good to be back and so heartily welcomed.

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