Sunday 24 April 2011

Six steps to bed and back.. Continued. Challenge Four


Pict. knights fighting with an armoured scorpion from Dungeon & Dragons online


......now for my fourth challenge - Where is the bathroom?  After wandering around the hotel bedroom and whistling loudly, all I hear in the room is the sort of echo only ever found in a cathedral.  I did eventually find the bathroom which was designed as a wet room, which was great, but it was so large it took me 15 minutes before I collided with the toilet. [Thank heavens I wasn’t desperate.]
Now then, unbeknownst to me, there was a button at waist height just outside the bathroom door. It was placed there to allow wheelchair users to open the front door from a distance (so that their wheelchair doesn't clatter into it when the bedroom door opens).  I stripped off in the main room and felt my way back to the bathroom. I had a great shower, but as I came out again. I collided with that button, which activated the front door… little did I know, that as I dried myself, the extra wide front door had very smoothly and silently opened.  Exposing my naked self to every passer by!   It was only days later when a colleague was pressing the button out of curiosity, that I discovered what had been happening.

Pict. of disability door access button


My penultimate challenge was to close the curtains, so that I didn't expose myself to the whole city as well as the residents in the hotel.

The room had electric powered curtains, which were operated from the side of the bed. Very luxurious and practical for a wheelchair user.  However, as a totally blind person, the only way I could tell if the curtains were open or closed was to get up, make my way across the room and physically feel for myself. If the curtains were open, it would then take a further five minutes to locate my bed again and activate the button and of course being completely paranoid now, I was never convinced that they worked, so I would have to get up yet again and check for a second time.
At last my sixth and final challenge - Sleep
I collapsed into bed exhausted with the day’s challenges’, whizzing round my head.  I had to find a way of calming the mind to get to sleep.  But after about 10minutes I woke up with a start.     OH NO….I’ve got to find my way down to breakfast in the morning, ..............I better get up now….

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