It Had To Happen

I knew the luck couldn’t last, that eventually the shine would tarnish and …… Okay, it really wasn’t that bad, but I did have my first difficult, dare I say bad, tour. It should have been great, I had a great guy to parallel with and we would be in Seward for the first night. Granted we had to deadhead at 3 am and MB, my parallel, wasn’t going to be there to greet his group on the cruise ship due to a poor scheduling by our supervisor. However, this is considered one of the great tours so I was optimistic. After a hearty Lido deck breakfast on-board, the other TD’s and I head for the lounge to get our guests. We barely arrive to say hello and our disembarkation number is called, and let me tell you, for 7 am, these people were eager to get going. So we head to our coaches but I don’t know which guests are MB’s and which are mine, so I pass out some paper work to everyone and jump on one of the coaches. Come to find out, it was MB’s group I jumped on with so I did not observed the loading of neither my wheelchair-bound guest that I didn’t know I had nor the injury she endured while being loaded on the lift. We made the very short transfer to the Kenai Fjords Cruise but since we had to circle in order to get a spot to unload, I once again missed my guests unloading and collecting the paperwork I asked them to fill out. That left me with 6 hours to kill with very little to do. After waiting that out, I went to pick up my group and found out that ADA (wheelchair-bound guest) had a breathing episode on the cruise boat and they called an ambulance for her.

She and her family decided not to go to the hospital, so I got them a ride to the hotel since our bus did not have a lift. We arrive at the Windsong Hotel to check in and they aren’t ready for us. So we have 120 milling around the lobby impatient to check in and get some rest. Finally, we start passing out the keys but the hotel has messed up a lot of our first floor request’s and in order to get that straighten out we had to halt the key passing out process. I now get introduced to the entire ADA family. The mother has diabetes, a prosthetic leg and a heart condition. The father looks about 100, rather frail, a replaced knee, a bad knee and hard of hearing. Then there is the daughter in charge of caring for them. She is brash, pushy, demanding and has a serious lack of patience. Unfortunately, the last trait is most often observed when she deals with her parents. I notice that later the girls take off for town and leave mom and dad to get themselves some dinner. Interesting. I know they are going to be the challenge but I also feel that this tour hasn’t gotten off to a good start.

The next day starts by finding out that I do not have a wheelchair-accessible coach scheduled. I inform dispatch, they complain that I didn’t give them enough notice; I say I didn’t know any earlier. The solution; we end up with a local shuttle that has a lift but is rickety and no bathroom. That is never something you want to tell a group. They were pretty good sports about it and we headed off on our way. Our only stop is the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and it is a great place. Well the daughter complains that it isn’t ADA accessible, which, in my estimation, it is for Alaska. She said that her mother could not get up the ramp because there was an inch or so gap between the ramp and the dirt driveway. Now, I have had my fair share of experience wielding wheelchairs and this obstacle was easily overcome. I had little sympathy but she went to the manager to throw a little fit. I doubt it accomplished anything and I don’t think she felt better. Meanwhile, I am confirming that our train car for the next day is accessible, which luckily it was. We got an ADA bus to the ADA train car but she couldn’t fit into the elevator to the 2^nd floor easily and was worried about bathroom access. We got her settled in the foyer (yes, our train cars have foyers) and proceeded on with the trip to Denali. About an hour in I asked the bartender to check to see if they need anything, since I had yet to notice the daughter or friend go down to check on them. I checked on them a few more times as the daughter hung out upstairs sleeping. About 3.5 hours in, one of the train managers came upstairs and asked if there are any doctors in the group, I had a bad feeling. Fortunately, one of my guests was and his wife was a nurse. We all headed downstairs and my bad feeling was correct, ADA was having breathing problems and chest constrictions. The doctor checked her out and was worried that the knock on the knee on day one may have created a pulmonary embolism. Terrific. The train manager called an ambulance to meet us at our stop in Talkeetna, fortunately it was only about 10 minutes away. The whole family got off the train and while going through all of this the daughter was taking the situation very lightly, cracking jokes and trying to flirt. Eventually, we got her off the train and into the ambulance, now the question is what to do with the rest of the family. Talkeetna is a cool little town, and is the one stop all mountaineers must make before attempting to climb Denali, however, they don’t have any cabs or rental cars. Eventually, we had to leave it in the hands of the railroad crew since we still had a schedule to keep and we were long past departure time. I promised to get the luggage sent back to Anchorage and gave them some numbers to contact for assistance. Now they were in somebody else’s hands. I did have to get the nice pieces of luggage and get it returned to Anchorage, but fortunately we have great people in Denali and I got that taken care, though it didn’t prevent them from getting a haranguing phone call from the daughter about it.

The rest of the tour proceeded with relative ease but I never quite got back into the flow. I had somewhat neglected the rest of the group and didn’t have enough time to gain that back. I received many compliments about how I handled the situation but I felt I could have done better with more information. We should have better information about handling disabilities or have better resources. The family did not accurately portray their issues when communicating with HAL and in my opinion they should never have attempted the land portion of their vacation. The put the ADA in a position of feeling like a problem to the group and that wasn’t good for either party. In the end, my comments were good note great and my tips were awful. Though I believe the bigger part of the gratuity issue is that this group just got off of the ship where all tips are included and now they are not. We are restricted from mentioning the topic in a straight forward manner and we all know that allusion doesn’t always do the job. I learned much from this tour though I didn’t enjoy it.

On a much brighter note, I just finished the same itinerary with a wonderful group associated with AAA. They were a joy to be with and easy to handle; the comments were terrific, both written and verbal and I attacked the gratuity issue more directly and was rewarded for the most part. This recent tour has helped return my faith in myself and find the fun in the job again.

Now I am off for 3 days again but this time I will be in Denali the entire time. I plan to take a long trip into the park and will get to spend some time with a friend coming in from Anchorage. I hope to have many animal photos to share in a few days.

Thanks for reading.

Pic 1 - Windsong Hotel
Pic 2 & 3 - View from hotel parking lot on a very rare day in Seward.