The burdens of the Wight

[cosmolinguist]

For years now, diffrentcolours has been saying he wants to take me to the Isle of Wight to see the WWII bunkers whwre British space rockets were tested in the 50s, because he knows I love space history. He'd been to this site with mother_bones previously, so he knew that while cars ordinarily don't have access to it, blue badge holders can drive up to and park at the site.

So today we woke up early to get the ferry (I'd never been on a ferry before! and despite learning most of what I know about ro-ro ferries being on a podcast about engineering disasters, I had a great time), at what his mum warned us was prohibitive cost (it really was eye-watering), drove to The Needles, and found a sign at the car park that said "no unauthorised vehicles can go this way, call this number to get authorised for accessible parking." The person in the ticket booth said the same: we had to call that number because there's only one accessible parking space up there. So it was just a matter of logistics?

D tried calling the number, no one answered. He tried again and couldn't get through. I didn't do any better trying on my phone. He was really upset by this point because the other option was paying for parking here and paying for the tour bus that is allowed to go up to the New Battery as its called (WWII is new if the old battery is from the Napoleonic War), or walking a mile uphill which he was assuming my ankle wouldn't be up to.

I was so angry at this -- why make everyone call once they get there? why can't the person who's dealing with parking down here also make these arrangements via landline? -- that I was more than sure enough I could walk. I didn't want to wait half an hour for a bus.

And I did enjoy the walk, though it was very windy. (Apparently we're having another named storm; I can hear the wind howling outside the window now and I guess it's worse at home. I'm glad it doesn't seem to have bothered Gary; wind often does because he doesn't understand where the noise is coming from and it clearly unsettles him. But MB has said he's been good all day and took himself off to bed at a very reasonable hour this evening.) But I did not enjoy the terrible inaccessible system that made it necessary.

To top it all off, two cars came past us on their way down as we were walking up, and when we got there, there was one car parked in enough room to have held four cars. We would have been fine. It would've saved me a lot of energy I could've used on more of the area. My ankle is still healing, and I'm lucky to have felt pretty good the rest of the day (and extremely glad for my all-terrain cane, which was perfect for this situation), but I'm still very definitely only given a certain amount of walking spoons a day and I shouldn't have had to spend them all on this.

D and I had a lovely day together, as we reliably do no matter how we spend the time with each other, but it was a new way for accessible routes/parking to be completely inaccessible, and that's never fun to discover.

Comments

[silveradept]

That's infuriating. If you're only going to leave one option for accessible parking, then it had better well be staffed to answer all. the. time. that someone might need it. Aaaargh.

(Glad your ankle held up, but still.)

[jesse_the_k]

Fuck that noise — glad that your ankle was up to it: good job healing!

[forests_of_fire]

That's so much bullshit. How is something accessible if you can't access any way to get permission to use it??