[stylist] Wondering if anyone has thoughts on blindness andindependant vacation travel?

[Julie J.]

I do a load of planning in advance.  Seriously, my family thinks I'm 
nutters!  I look up restaurants with Urban Spoon.  I prebook all my day 
trips.  I pick things that include transportation or I negotiate 
transportation when I book the excursion.  an example, when I hired a local 
lady to take my son and I clam digging, I negotiated the price to include 
her picking us up at the B&B.   I found local cab companies in advance and 
emailed them to check on prices and secretly to make sure they were still in 
business.  I put everything in a 3 ring binder that goes with me...all the 
tickets, schedules, phone numbers etc.  I'm obsessive about the planning. 
It's worked out really well.

To clarify...usually when I go on vacation, it is with my sighted son.  He 
doesn't drive and has only recently learned to reliably read maps and follow 
complicated directions.  on the rare occasions I go on vacations with my 
sighted husband, I still do all the same planning.    My husband has very 
little experience with travel, does not drive in big cities and becomes 
overwhelmed with a lot of new things at once.  He has some mental health 
issues that he struggles with.  So when we travel together, I have to be way 
on top of the agenda,  so everything goes smoothly and he doesn't panic.

Honestly though, what I've found is that it's not particularly difficult to 
arrange all the transportation and guides.  A lot of people fly in and don't 
want to rent a car, so they are utilizing cabs or tour buses that pick up at 
their hotel.  It's pretty typical for people to want to hire tour guides to 
take them around, showing them the good stuff.  They adapt pretty easily 
when you explain the specific information that you would find most 
interesting/helpful.  After all they are used to explaining the history or 
telling stories,, so it's only a small change for them to describe things 
visually too.

Hope you have lots of fun!
Julie
Courage to Dare: A Blind Woman's Quest to Train her Own Guide Dog is now 
available! Get the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QXZSMOC
Visit my new website on developing courage and living authentically:
http://www.falling-up.com
-----Original Message----- 
From: Semirhage via stylist
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 5:24 AM
To: Writers' Division Mailing List
Subject: [stylist] Wondering if anyone has thoughts on blindness 
andindependant vacation travel?

The introvert topic inspired this line of thought so I thought I'd bring it 
up here to see if anyone had experiences that could be useful.
My husband and I are both visually impaired but he's got better vision than 
I do. Still neither are of us are comfortable going to Greece or Hungary or 
any of the other places we'd like to visit alone or without having a friend 
who lives there or something to meet up with. IT just seems so daunting 
traveling there alone  without knowing anything. Granted we wander around 
town here and find new stores and restaurants all the time, but that's 
different somehow.At least we have some basic idea of where things are I 
suppose and we're not on a limited time frame as we'd be when on vacation.
We're going on a cruse instead as a friend of ours told us that we can 
travel in a group at each stop that way. We'll feel more at ease that way 
and also like we're not missing everything. LOL. So just wondering if there 
were any other thoughts or experiences on this. I know the ideal trip would 
be to go with other sighted friends, but they're not usually ready to go 
when we are or to the same place. LOL.
Sem
I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed.
I get along with the voices inside of my head.
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