Test Drive - Rochester
Feb. 18th, 2015 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidgillon So I took the chair into Rochester for a test-drive this afternoon as I needed to run a couple of errands (getting a new battery for my watch in particular).
Oh dear, cobbles to the left of him, cobbles to the right of him, and where it wasn't cobbles it was 'heritage' flagged pavement, so picture irregular flags with significant variation in surface height and smoothness, and mortared gaps between them big enough to grab your front castor and bring you to a stop. In fact if I park where I normally park, the pavement on one side of Minor Canon Row is too narrow for a chair due to a cunningly placed electrical junction box, and on the other has a foot high kerb (sadly that's not an exaggeration), so I had to wheel along the road. And when I got to the jewellers they had one of those old fashioned set-back doorways with a step up to it, so nothing to do but get out of the chair and haul it inside.
Given the state my shoulders were in by that point I abandoned the rest of the errands and headed back to the car, which turns out to be more uphill than I'd realised. I managed about half of it (so I'll have wheeled about 600m all told), but eventually my shoulders gave out and I had to do the rest of it using the chair as a walker. I knew Rochester was going to be a problem, but it's even more of a problem than I'd realised now that I'm looking at it from wheelchair height. I'm going to have to do the trip more often to build up upper body strength, but that isn't going to fix cobbled pavements and stepped entrances.
Oh dear, cobbles to the left of him, cobbles to the right of him, and where it wasn't cobbles it was 'heritage' flagged pavement, so picture irregular flags with significant variation in surface height and smoothness, and mortared gaps between them big enough to grab your front castor and bring you to a stop. In fact if I park where I normally park, the pavement on one side of Minor Canon Row is too narrow for a chair due to a cunningly placed electrical junction box, and on the other has a foot high kerb (sadly that's not an exaggeration), so I had to wheel along the road. And when I got to the jewellers they had one of those old fashioned set-back doorways with a step up to it, so nothing to do but get out of the chair and haul it inside.
Given the state my shoulders were in by that point I abandoned the rest of the errands and headed back to the car, which turns out to be more uphill than I'd realised. I managed about half of it (so I'll have wheeled about 600m all told), but eventually my shoulders gave out and I had to do the rest of it using the chair as a walker. I knew Rochester was going to be a problem, but it's even more of a problem than I'd realised now that I'm looking at it from wheelchair height. I'm going to have to do the trip more often to build up upper body strength, but that isn't going to fix cobbled pavements and stepped entrances.
