Written by Melanie Hawkes – PDA’s WA Associate Director
I was fortunate to win a trip to Vienna in February 2024. It was to attend the Zero Project Conference1 at the United Nations. It’s a global conference for people with disabilities to share ideas and innovative solutions to barriers. As a woman with a physical disability and a power wheelchair user, I had won because of a video about my pointer stick that I use to help me do everyday tasks. The judges thought I was an innovator for inventing a simple solution which had a profound impact on my independence.
The conference organisers wanted me to fly in the day before, stay the four nights, and fly home the day after the conference. “Do you know how far Austria is from Australia?” I asked. They may sound similar, but the two countries are on opposite sides of the world from each other, plus there’s a seven-hour time difference. Fortunately there was an Australian (who now lives in France) on this Zoom call, who agreed it wasn’t fair to make me fly 17 hours each way for only four nights. They agreed I could stay longer, as long as I flew in and out of Vienna and paid for the extra nights myself.
So how many nights did I want to stay? I checked my annual leave balance at work and found out that I could go for three weeks.
My flights and accommodation only got confirmed four weeks before I left. So it didn’t leave much time to plan my trip. One thing I really wanted to do was ski in the Austrian Alps. If I’m going to go in winter, I may as well go skiing. Yes people in wheelchairs can ski! I’ve skied twice before: once in Japan and once at Mt Buller in Victoria. It is so much fun that I recommend it to everyone. Even though I hate the cold, it’s worth it.
I made some inquiries before leaving, and booked a tentative date with a disabled ski school in a town called Schladming, three-hours by car from Vienna.
When I arrived in Vienna, I asked the hotel staff to research some accessible transport options for me to get there. They came back to us a few days later: a taxi costing €930 (over $1,500)! Plus if I was to stay overnight, I had to pay for the driver’s accommodation, dinner and breakfast! I said no thanks.
My ski booking was moved to the Sunday after the Zero Project Conference, which gave us more time to plan. First thing was transport. Amy, my support worker, didn’t mind if she had to drive us there. But it meant going up the day before and returning the day after. It was too far for a day trip. If someone else was driving we could have done it in one very long day.
We made numerous phone calls and got lucky with Hertz in Vienna. They had one wheelchair accessible vehicle for hire, was available for the weekend, would allow Amy to drive it (but needed to pay extra as she’s under 25) and would cost about €250. A bargain compared to the taxi.
With transport sorted, we needed accommodation for two nights. We called the Schladming Tourist Centre and asked them to find something for us. After two days they hadn’t found anything, and the weekend was fast approaching. We spent that morning on the phone, calling every place close to the ski school. On our fifth or sixth attempt, we got lucky: a wheelchair access room with two separate beds, available for the two nights and not too far from the ski school. We couldn’t believe we got transport and accommodation sorted at last.
But a few hours later Hertz emailed me to say our hire car had technical problems and is off the road! And it wouldn’t be fixed before we needed it. Yep. Just when we thought we could relax and look forward to the trip to the mountains.
So it was back to square one. We called a lot of disability transport providers but none could help. In desperation, I tracked down the lady who booked my airport transfers. Her name was Eva and she was at the conference. Maybe she could help?
Unfortunately we’d already tried the company she used and they weren’t available. “But I might know someone who has a van,” Eva said. We left it with her and asked everyone we met at the conference as well.
That night we emailed the hotel to say we had transport issues and couldn’t confirm the booking just yet, but would be in touch soon. On the Friday we still hadn’t heard back from Eva, so we found her at the closing ceremony of the conference. She made a phone call while we waited in front of her.
Her friend of a friend had a wheelchair van we could borrow – for free! We couldn’t believe our luck. The only catch was that we had to go to a country train station to pick it up, and have it back by 3pm on Monday. Easy, or so we thought.
With transport sorted, we emailed the hotel straight away to confirm our booking. At 10pm, and as we got into bed, I received a reply from the hotel. It read: “You no longer have a booking with us as you did not confirm in time.”
Oh dear. (Not exactly what I said at the time but too explicit to write). It was as if the universe was against us going skiing. We tried calling the hotel but there was no answer, so emailed them asking if they had another suitable room available. I was only going for two nights and wasn’t taking my shower chair anyway. As long as the room was accessible and had two beds, I didn’t really care what the bathroom was like. Not at this late stage when we were leaving the next morning!
We had an email from them in the morning with a choice of two rooms. I chose one, clicked on the link that said “confirm” and a webpage opened that said “thank you for confirming your booking”. All sorted, I hoped.
We finished packing, pushed the hoist down to the station, found the train we needed and bought our tickets. Only we missed our connecting train as it didn’t have wheelchair access (plus we didn’t know where we needed to go or where the lifts were). Some of these stations were huge with changing platforms so you have to check the display boards (like at the airport).
We found staff that could help us get on the next train, but we were late picking up the van by about an hour and a half. Especially since we couldn’t even find our way out of that station!
We met up with Mr Harrer, who didn’t speak much English. Amy and I had started learning German on Duolingo only 10 weeks prior, so weren’t very capable of communicating with him. But he’d brought a friend with him and she could be our interpreter.
After removing some of the back seats so I could fit, and folding up my hoist, Amy was handed the keys. Our dream of being in the mountains was about to come true.
It was Amy’s first time driving on the wrong side of the road, in a left-hand-drive vehicle (we didn’t tell Mr Harrer that). It was the little things, like having to use your right hand to change gears, and the indicator switch on the opposite side that confused her the most. I kept guiding her to stay within the lane and which lane to go in when turning. But two hours later we arrived at the hotel surrounded by snow. We had no idea that they’d had snow the night before – the first after about four weeks with none! It was amazing timing for us.
We entered the warm reception and the lady asked “Can I help you?”
I told her my name and she looked confused. “You didn’t confirm your booking,” she said.
I showed her the confirmation I got on the website on my phone. Turned out there was a glitch in her system and she didn’t receive a notification.
“Well, do you still have a room available?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied, much to our relief.
She had housekeeping prepare our room while Amy got things out of the van. In my rush and desperation to book accommodation, I never asked about clearance under the bed for my hoist. I could see in the photos that one bed didn’t, but the other was a sofa bed. All sofa beds have clearance, right? I’d thought. When we got up to the room and checked, I was wrong. Neither bed had space underneath for the hoist legs to go under. How would I get into bed and out again safely?
We decided to go down for dinner and leave that problem for later. But putting it off wasn’t going to solve the problem. After dinner, Amy sat on both beds and decided she wanted the sofa bed as the other was too soft. Even though the sofa bed was the easiest to get me onto with the hoist. The other bed was built into the wall so couldn’t be moved or raised. I did consider sleeping in my wheelchair, but this was an expensive hotel so wanted to sleep in their bed.
We moved some furniture around to make space, but still couldn’t get close enough. One piece of furniture was a large wooden coffee table, and just happened to be the same height as the top of the mattress.
“What if we hoisted me onto the table, then slid me onto the bed?” I asked Amy. She sat on the table to make sure it was sturdy. It might actually work, we thought. We put the hoist side-on to the bed, I drove underneath and she hoisted me up. Then Amy moved my chair back and put the table underneath, and covered it with the duvet and my poncho which was slippery on the outside. She lowered me onto the table, disconnected me from the hoist, then ran around the other side of the bed and pulled me with the duvet. It worked! We were excited but exhausted, and to think we’d have to do it again for both mornings and nights. But we had a way which worked, and our reward was to ski the next day.
There was no way I was going to be late for my ski booking at 11am, so we set the alarm early. We had no idea how much longer it would take to get me off the bed again. When Amy got up, she opened the blinds. The view took our breath away. It was 7am, and the sun had just touched the top of the mountain range we could see, highlighting the snow. There was still snow on our balcony balustrade too. It was like waking up in a fairy tale book; we thought we were dreaming. It’s the kind of scene you’d only see in a calendar or on a postcard. And here it was, right outside our hotel window, on a trip that almost didn’t happen. It made us forget all about our problems and go out and enjoy the day. We had made it.
Melanie in her sit-ski with her guide Sevie
1See https://www.youtube.com/live/8e1bqt419RY?si=FKVOIIMggk-2DHIL for the live stream of my presentation at the conference in Vienna.
