So I have been very fortunate in landing myself a job almost immediately after graduating. I’m not really sure how it happened and I feel incredibly lucky to be in the position that I’m in. What this has meant however, is that I have watched many of my friends jetting off on various holidays over the course of the summer while I have been commuting to and from Southwark every day.

What I decided to do was to have a mini getaway just by myself and take a couple of days off work and make it a long weekend. I then set about the process of working out where I was going to go and then booking things.

First of all, where am I going? (I’m only talking about my holiday, where am I going in life is a completely different kettle of fish and not so easy to answer!)

The answer to that was pretty easy, Stratford-upon-Avon. Being a lover of all things Shakespeare I’ve always been keen to go there. I’ve been a couple of times to see some things at the RSC’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre but I haven’t ever had the time to go exploring and really admire the area. So that was that decision made. 👍

Next was an easy one as well. Getting there. Thanks to my wonderful Motability car I know I can jump (figuratively) in that and have a safe journey there and back. So that was that sorted. 👍

Then it got slightly trickier. Booking a hotel. Don’t get me wrong, I found plenty of hotels in Stratford-upon-Avon. The difficulty I had was finding any that had information about accessibility let alone an actual disabled room! I looked at all the websites and couldn’t find any information whatsoever about whether or not I would even be able to access the building or whether I would be faced with a flight of stairs at every turn. I stumbled across the following website: stratford-upon-avon.co.uk which went a small way to helping the process. They had a handy little side bar with key information about each hotel. There were, however, two issues with this: 1) they removed this feature soon after I found it 2) when it came to information regarding accessibility if there weren’t any specific features it just said something along the lines of “may be accessible for some people with disabilities”. Now this is one of the main reasons that I started this blog. We are all lumped under this big “DISABLED” umbrella which could be anything from visual impairment to being a full-time wheelchair user. So telling me that a hotel “MIGHT” be ok for someone with a disability doesn’t help me because you could have Braille on the sign telling me which way it is to reception but that doesn’t help if there are eight stairs to get there…

I eventually booked my hotel thanks to the wonder that is disabledgo.com which has in depth information about all the features of a hotel that you could possibly need to know as a person with a disability. And they don’t just do hotels, they have restaurants, pubs, bars, museums, pretty much everything. So I specified hotel, typed in my destination and how far away I was willing to be from the town centre and I was given a list of all the accessible hotels matching my results. Upon clicking on a hotel I then had available to me all the information I could possibly want which was such a breath of fresh air after all the hotel website I’d trawled through trying to find the smallest scrap of information about accessibility.

From there I was taken to the Premier Inn website which was also pretty good for how much information they had available. And the only hotel website that I could book a disabled room online! It’s a miracle!

So whenever I’m making plans for another getaway or any other adventure my first point of call will most definitely be disabledgo.com because it really is amazing and I really did have all the information I could possibly want at my fingertips. I think it might even get a spot on my favourites bar!