Wheel Newbie - Return Trip from Liverpool to Dover

byIanCampbell

324 followers

10 years ago

Wheel Newbie - Return trip Liverpool-Dover

The last time I posted on this topic I had undertaken a trip by National Express Coach from Dover, in the south-east of England, to Liverpool in the north-west, a distance of 317miles and with a scheduled time of 8 hours plus stop-overs (2 hours in London). I had elected to travel as a disabled person independently of my wheelchair. This meant that when I got to the bus, the coach driver would stow my wheelchair in the baggage compartment and I mounted the coach using my prosthesis and a walking stick. The benefit of booking my ticket like this is that you are automatically reserved a seat right at the front of the bus, behind the driver. However, as the main purpose of the trip was for it to be a learning experience, I chose to return as a wheelchair-bound passenger. This meant that I was to be loaded in the wheelchair into a space where the front seats had been removed, right at the front of the bus. This seat removal has to be done by the garage mechanics and it is for this reason that they require 36 hour notice for the service.

You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when checking-in at Liverpool Coach Station, the coach driver expected to load my wheelchair into the baggage hold and professed his complete ignorance as to the loading procedure of a fully laden wheelchair with me in it! So the journey was off to a great start! Luckily, there were other coach drivers around and they were able to demonstrate the loading procedure to my ‘inexperienced wheelchair-loading driver.’ The lesson in this, I think, is covered by Murphy’s Law ‘if it can go wrong, it will go wrong’!

Another lesson, well-learned, was how much more comfortable the journey was in my wheelchair than in the ‘plush’ coach seat. Apart from the inexperienced wheelchair-loading driver on the Liverpool-London stage, the loading/unloading process was seamlessly efficient and the staff at the Coach stations conveyed me smoothly from coach to Disabled Passengers’ Lounge at Victoria Coach Station in London. In this Lounge, you can Check-in for your coach and when your coach is ready to be loaded, the staff collect you and transport you to your coach and make sure that you are safely loaded. The minor glitches I encountered, inform me that it is a service which is not used very often. One last point about this. The Disabled Persons’ Lounge at Victoria Coach Station is not run by the National Express Coach Company but by London Transport.