Unable to decide

Another wet day arrives. This winter seems full of them. The idea of sun & warmth draws us, but where to? We seem to be in a dither of indecision. I suspect we’re almost too tired to make any decision. And that goes to show how much we need a break.

For most of our married life – and that’s nearly 40 years now – we never went away. We just got on with work & had day trips off into the Lakes or Pennines. We occasionally got away but that tended to be a weekend break decided on the spur of the moment. We just went & found a B&B when we got there. 

With disability in the 80s came the need for a holiday, an escape from the everyday routine. A holiday has become a necessity. It’s strange I never thought I would have said that. I always regarded a holiday as a wonderful indulgence, not a necessity.

It wasn’t until the 1990s we first ventured abroad – for a few days break in the Loire area of France. We didn’t fly until this century – our first expedition was to Tenerife. Since then we’ve travelled the world.

Unfortunately with disability we may have gained the time to go away, but we’ve lost the spontaneity of just going when you feel like it. Even these days, it’s not always easy to find appropriate accommodation. We can no longer just go, confident we’ll find somewhere to stay once we’ve got there. Planning is needed if the trip stands a chance of success. Trains & planes need at least 24 hours’ notice in order to organise assistance to get you on or off. Most hotels still haven’t got appropriate showering facilities – fine if you’re only away for a day or two, more of a problem if you’re off for a week or two.

On top of that there’s the uncertainty of how you going to feel on a day, how you’re going to cope with the travelling involved. If we’re going abroad we’ve come to the conclusion it really needs to be at least a week, ideally 10 days, to give us chance to recover from the journey & start to feel the benefit of the holiday.

We keep telling ourselves we ought to book the next holiday as soon as we get home, while we’re still fresh & re-energised. However, we rarely manage to do it as we get waylaid by the next bout of problems, so often medical ones, & everything gets put on hold. And so we end up in the state we’re in now. In dire need of a break but too tired to decide on anything. Maybe we should try a weekend break in the Lakes & see if that revitalises us a bit. The really frustrating thing is that when we came back from France last September, we had decided on our hotel, discovered it had a disabled room, to find when we came to book it the hotel wasn’t prepared to put a seat in the shower so that idea had to be abandoned. Grr…