The ease (or not) of getting around

We're in a strange moment in our travels.

We're in our last city that we are ostensibly scouting out to see if we want to live here: Santander. We are halfway through our two week stay here.

But, we've actually already chosen to settle in the greater Bilbao area. Santander would need to truly blow our minds in some key ways to have us shift our path.

So, we arrived here kind of travel weary. Kind of, "Why are we here?"

In fact, Santander has been quite disappointing.

Some of our highest priority qualities we're looking for to make our decision have to do with transportation and accessibility. How easily can we live there and get to all of the things we want to do without a car? How safe/comfortable/functional is it to bike for transportation? How confident can we be that a wheeled mobility device can navigate the city with ease? Which are really all questions about the values of the city/area. How much has the city prioritized human-scale transportation and disability access?

The first hint about Santander was right outside of our apartment.

In some of the very hilly areas of cities that we've stayed in or visited, some of the hills have elevator/escalators (diagonal elevators that follow the grade of the hill, which I believe are called funiculars) to get up the hills. The funiculars easily fit wheelchairs, mobility scooters, strollers, wheeled bags for walking home with your groceries that are ubiquitous here. Also bicycles. Moving walkways can​​ take a lot of those options, also.

In Santander, there's a road right next to our apartment and another two blocks in the other direction from our apartment that have these assists to get from the main drag up five blocks to the top of the hill to Calle Alta​ (Upper Street) where we're staying. Two of those blocks have escalators, which technically can't take most of those wheeled transportation devices, and stairs next to it. So, people who need wheeled mobility... They just can't get up these hills. People who can walk get an easy ride, and wheelchair users can only use other roads who no assists to get up those hills.

In the Bilbao area, we only saw the funiculars, meaning however you would be transporting on a sidewalk, you could get up the hill with the assist.

In addition to hill assists being accessibility barriers, we have had more than one instance of trying to get to a play area (an indoor trampoline park and an outdoor skate park) where there wasn't a safe walking/biking route. Either the sidewalk would just disappear with no crosswalk to get to the other side, or, in the case of the trampoline park, so many dangerous roads, including a round-a-bout, with fast moving cars, that we had to traverse with no sidewalks to get from the train station to the building. Which meant the trampolines park was really only meant to be accessed by car. When Pippin and I were going to the trampoline park, I was incredulous that the way the map was taking us (the round-a-bout with fast moving cars and no sidewalks) could possibly be the best route, so I kept trying other routes, only to find that there was a freeway in the way on any other route.

Then, there was today.

We were attempting to get to the Neptuno Niño beach that had charmed us on our drive through Santander a few weeks past that inspired us to check the city out as a place to live. Morgan and Tui took the city bike share bikes, and Pippin and I took the mobility scooter and bus to get there so that either Morgan (whose chronic back injury keeps them from being able to walk more than a few minutes without a ton of pain) or Tui (who had twisted his ankle a few days ago at a climbing gym) could get around on the scooter once we got to the area.

We met at an ice cream stand and had to traverse a bit from there to the beach we were trying to get to.

We split up, me with Pippin, who was rolling around in the sand on the beach right below the ice cream stand, and Morgan and Tui, who were sticking to the sidewalk to have more solid ground and less sand for their walk/roll.

The path that Morgan and Tui were on was a ways above the beach.

They kept coming across a ramp coming down the hill that led to stairs, or a ramp with a few stairs to get down to it. Again, accessible by walking. Not accessible by rolling.

This is on top of all of the many curbs with no curb cuts in Santander.

The lack of accessibility is wearing our family down. Frustration, feeling demoralized, feeling unvalued by the literal infrastructure of a city, all can wear one down and decrease resilience for dealing with any of the other difficulties of life.

Morgan names the visceral feeling that in Bilbao, they can go out and trust that their transportation needs have been cared for, whereas in Santander, we have experienced over and over again that they have not.