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Report on a Holiday to Tenerife By Les
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I had a stroke in January 2001, which resulted in a loss of sensation and movement on the left-hand side of my body I then started the long road to recovery. I did this by having Physio and Occupational therapy and spending many hours of hard work with my family and friends, working on balance / movement and the every day tasks i.e. dressing, bathing, and general independence. I found one of the best ways to motivate myself was by setting short term and long term goals, and then working towards them. On achievement of the goal I would set a new goal. With the overall goal being to return to as near to my previous lifestyle as possible. Before my stroke my wife and I enjoyed taking holidays at home and abroad. We decided to explore the possibility of doing this again. To this end we sat down and planned the long-term goal of taking a foreign holiday. We decided to do this by setting short-term goals first. This took the form of two one week holidays, one in the south of England and one in the north of England, both times we chose hotels which advertised disabled facilities. The one we found on Teletext and the other on the Internet, which I may add contains a lot of information for the disabled traveller. Both of these hotels turned out have excellent facilities and we thoroughly enjoyed these holidays. Although it was a challenge we found perseverance and a good sense of humour helped enormously. This showed that we can do the things we used to do but we may have to do them differently. These two short term goals achieved we decided to do the “big one”. In the planning stage we realised there were a number of issues, which needed to be addresses i.e.
We decided the best way to sort these issues out was to visit a good travel agent with our list of requirements. In this case we used Thomas Cook in Oldbury, where we found the staff very helpful and friendly. The first issue of medical suitability was sorted out by a visit to my G.P who issued me with a letter stating my suitability to travel, which the Insurance Companies require before allowing you to fly. We then looked at some brochures along with the staff and after a period of time with many phone calls to different companies we settled on a hotel that described itself as having facilities for the disabled in Playa de las Americas in Tenerife. We were advised to book wheelchair assistance at the Airport, which turned out to be really helpful and ensured us a front row seat with reasonable access on the plane. The four-hour flight to Tenerife proved to be tiring but the airline staff treated us well. The 4 star hotel turned out to be about twenty years old and in need of a face-lift. The staff were very helpful but the room with disabled facilities turned out to be on the first floor directly above the very noisy disco. It had none of the facilities we had come to expect from the British hotels i.e. walk in shower and grab rails etc. in fact my wife said “that the only disabled and friendly thing in the room was me”.
However a trip to reception the following morning soon had us moved to a higher floor but again the disabled friendly room had no useful adaptations. The balcony held two sun-beds and four chairs. Although the hotel advertised three lifts it was very rare that all three were working, this caused very long waiting times for a wheelchair user. On one occasion all three lifts were non-operational and I had to be transferred to the second floor via the service lift. So as well as a good sense of humour we found that patience was also required on a number of occasions. But despite these problems the rest of the hotel had some excellent facilities and the restaurant and bar were particularly good. We found in the main the resort of Playa de las Americas / Los Christianos was wheelchair friendly. Even having ramps down onto the beaches and wheelchair / pushchair routes across the sand. We found a number of the organised trips and evening functions were also accessible to wheelchair users. Though it took me a number of days to acclimatise I soon found that if I was prepared to adapt and persevere I could do most things that I wanted to without to much trouble to myself or my carers. Overall we had a good time and despite my anxieties about flying and being abroad as a wheelchair user, I felt great satisfaction in achieving my goal. My advise to other disabled people considering going abroad for a holiday, is if your G.P. is happy for you to fly then with a bit of research and the help of a good travel agent I see no reason why you should not ‘go for it’. AND don’t forget the postcards!!!!
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