For Travel + Leisure’s column Traveling As , we’re talking to travelers about what it’s like to explore the world through their unique perspectives. We chatted with New Yorker Lakshmee Lachhman-Persad , whose younger sister, Annie, was born with cerebral palsy and is a wheelchair user. But instead of letting it limit their travel experience, Lachhman-Persad launched Accessible Travel NYC to document their daycations around the city. Here’s her story…
My sister and I are from Guyana , the only English-speaking country in South America. We often get lumped in with the Caribbean because the language and culture matches more than South American. As kids, we moved to the neighboring, Dutch-speaking country Suriname, and then I moved to New York for college.
My sister, Annie, is two years younger than me and was born with cerebral palsy. She can’t control all of her muscles, causing spams, which affects her speech as well. She had outgrown her medical care, so she moved [to NYC], too, about a year and a half after I did.
I also have non-apparent disabilities. I live with chronic pain, vertigo, and early onsets of hearing loss. Since my vertigo is episodic, in the warmer months, my cognitive processes slow down, so I always have to tell people to just give me time to process.
Growing up in two third-world countries, we didn't have a car, so we didn’t really explore the country we were born in. In Suriname, we did some very local sightseeing.
But I ended up working in travel and tourism, selling New York City as a destination to tourists. The truth is, I hadn't thought about people with disabilities as a market segment—or the city as a place I could enjoy with my family. I think it's because of the lack of representation in travel marketing, which I was guilty of as well. When you don’t see positive storytelling from diverse perspectives, you don't know what exists.
We were going through a difficult time at home—and if we didn’t go out in the community, it would have been detrimental to our lives. So, as an act of caretaking, I started to look into what’s accessible in New York. I started thinking about it from their perspective and I realized there is not a lot of information. Yet at least 25 percent of our population lives with disabilities .
So I started Accessible Travel NYC and began documenting what we now call our family daycations around the city.
We live in the Bronx
and the closest major attraction is the New York Botanical Garden, just a few minutes away on the public bus. We decided to take our first daycation there. It was Annie, our mom, my daughter, and me.
For Annie, we had to book transportation through the MTA’s Access-A-Ride
. You have to reserve a day in advance and can’t make any changes. It happened to be the last day of the Orchid Show and one of the warmest days of the spring season. The garden was packed, and we didn't book a lot of time. We were in a long line to see the orchids in the conservatory, thinking we wouldn’t get in.
Then, a staff member came up to me and said, “Since you have a wheelchair user with you, you can go to the front of the line.” That made all the difference in the world to us, and we left feeling very welcome.
We had been to the garden separately, but now it was something we could do collectively. We were building memories together that we could talk about for years to come. It was incredible to share in the moment.
And, of course, we got to see the orchids. Annie loves flowers and my mom, coming from warmer climates, has been a gardener. She had to plant the food they ate to survive. We always grew up with beautiful flowers in our front yard and a vegetable garden in our backyard.
That was seven years ago and I started recording these daycations on the site. Now we’ve done more than I’ve had time to add.
On another occasion, we went downtown to One World Observatory and had lunch at Brookfield Place , then watched the sunset. We were too full for dessert at lunch, but it’s a big thing with the children—and for Annie and myself, too. But the Access-A-Ride was coming, so we had to run across Brookfield Place to get macarons to go. Everyone was laughing—and it’s a memory that always stays with me.
We’ve also visited Lincoln Center , as well as Summit One Vanderbilt , which invited us to come see their space. First, we went when it was crowded to show what it was like to navigate. Then, we went back when it was completely empty and arrived dressed up in our Indian clothing. To feel beautiful in such a beautiful space was special.
We’ve also been to smaller institutions, like the Queens Museum . We made the conscious decision to visit because they were working with a blind artist at that time. Plus, their cafeteria sources local food. We thoroughly enjoyed spending time in the space, seeing new artists.
After all these local trips with the six of us—Annie, my mom, daughter, son, and husband—we finally had our first family vacation abroad to visit four cities in Flanders. They treated us like royalty.
Still, transportation is one of the biggest barriers for people with disabilities. When you're on a plane, you can't use the bathroom if you're a wheelchair user, so you have to plan in advance. Annie also has to fly in bigger seats because she needs more space to be propped up with pillows. Once there, we got accessible transportation for the entire trip. That helped us see more and spend our time in more enjoyable ways.
There's also the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens. Going in there and hearing “What a Wonderful World" was amazing. The house is historic, so it’s not fully accessible, but the new center they've opened is.
The Flanders trip was a dream we would have never imagined would come to be, especially coming from a low-income background and not finding accessible information.
Annie truly enjoys being out and with my children, having those moments with all of us. She's also an artist, and every time we go see art, it fuels her creativity for what she wants to create and share with the world.
As a big sister, it’s about watching my little sister share her experiences back with us, and building new experiences together so that we have these collective memories we can laugh and talk about as we age.
I highly encourage people to think about daycations. There's a wellness component to it: Once you're out of your home and in a different space, you are often in a happier place. If we go to cultural institutions, we're learning about different artists and their viewpoints. When we eat out, we're learning about different cuisines.
These local daycations connect us to a world of joy and happiness that we would not have gotten inside our homes.
Read the original article on Travel & Leisure
