Ever dream of having your own little island somewhere, where everything was laid back, no one was in a hurry, and the rest of the world didn’t even know you existed? Well,
this is the place.
I’ll bet not one person in a hundred has even heard of the place, much less knows where it is.
We had a really funny experience getting to the Isle of Man, and we’d like to tell you that story now:
Less than a year after Nancy had her strokes, I was invited to speak at a medical conference in England. I accepted, and when that was finished, I had the opportunity to try out some
of the strategies I had been working on to improve Nancy’s enjoyment of life.
The Isle of Man lies not far off the coast from Liverpool, England, and they say that on a clear day, you can also see the coast of Northern Ireland. I thought we should go, just for
the heck of it.
We bought tickets on Manx Air, flying out of Manchester, England. At the time, there had been a great deal of concern about bombings and fighting in Northern Ireland, and all passengers
traveling throughout the area were under extreme scrutiny. Remember, this was years before 9/11, and we were not accustomed to having our luggage turned inside out or being “patted down”, looking
for weapons or bombs.
They separated the two of us to do the search and interrogation, and I was very uncomfortable about being apart from Nancy for the first time, especially since she had yet to achieve
much ability to understand, let alone answer any questions.
I explained this to the team of guards checking me out, and they assured me Nancy was in good hands. I would be reunited with her as soon as they completed their search. When they finished,
they escorted me down a fight of stairs to the tarmac. I did not see my wife.
“I hope you don’t expect her handle stairs,”
I said. “She can’t walk.”
“Don’t worry”, they told me, “we have a lift.”
I naturally assumed they meant an elevator, as “lift”
is what they call elevators in the UK.
“Ah, here she is now,” one of them exclaimed.
I looked and saw her- perhaps 25 feet in the air, she and her wheelchair inside the scoop of a gigantic fork lift, driving across the tarmac and being hoisted onto the plane!
Yeah, go ahead and laugh now, but I tell you, at the time, I nearly died from fright... |
