Marcia Frost

I was invited to spend a long weekend in Butler County, Ohio, just after they became Wheel The World certified for accessibility. The tourism board wanted me to write about how wheelchair accessible the region is. I hadn’t been there before, and it sounded like an interesting area, so I made plans to go. My trip to Butler County turned out to be one of my most unusual adventures, with new experiences, and a lot of donuts!   I brought Teddy and my friend, Heather, along for the ride, about three and a half hours from home. We had a nice welcome basket waiting for us at the hotel. Our home base was the Marriott Cincinnati North in Westerville. I was happy at the start with a flat entrance and automatic doors. They didn’t have any accessible rooms, so we had two connecting rooms. Teddy loved going back and forth between the two rooms. Mine had plenty of space for me to wheel around, a well-equipped desk area I could reach, and a large bathroom with a shower chair. The handheld was...

  It was my final day in Atlanta with my niece, Moriah, and I decided to plan something a little different. I had a late flight going home and I arranged for us to spend the day near the airport. It wasn’t the experience you’d expect,   The Atlanta Airport District promotes airport hotels and activities around the area, with ease in getting to the airport. It’s a different look at where to stay in Atlanta without just your typical quick stay hotels without the amenities you don’t often see at airport hotels. Since my flight wasn’t leaving until 9:00 pm, I had a lot of time after our noon checkout at The American Hotel downtown. Moriah met me at the hotel, and I rolled and she walked to the MARTA train station.   Downtown has very convenient MARTA stations. There were actually four within a few blocks of the hotel. The only problem was that the elevators for handicap access were not next to the entrance. It took us a while, and help from a police officer, to figur...

I started my morning at The American Hotel , a Signia Hotel by Hilton, with breakfast from their Friendship Market. My niece, Moriah met me at about 11:00 for a day of fun at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights was under construction and closed, but we planned to visit the rest of the attractions that surround the park. A CityPass helped make this easier. With one, I didn’t have to worry about lines to get tickets for each place.   Centennial Olympic Park was opened for the 1996 Olympics. It has been maintained quite well and it’s hard to believe it is 40 years old. Remnants and dedications to the Olympics are represented in the middle, including the Quilt of Nations, Gateway of Dreams, and Olympic Ring Fountain. Our first stop was the Georgia Aquarium. If you have followed my work, you’d know I love Aquariums and visit whenever they are near where I’m staying. This one was only a couple of blocks away from the hotel.   Th...

I have flown through Atlanta more times than I can remember, but it has been about 10 years since I got out of the airport. My niece, Moriah, decided to get her MSN in nursing at Emory and I had another good reason to go. The flights to Atlanta, Georgia, went well. I used frequent flyer miles for this trip. There is a direct flight close to here in Bloomington, Illinois. I did not have enough miles for that roundtrip so I and took American Airlines from Champaign, through Chicago, to Atlanta. It was the first time I was texted a photo of my wheelchair being unloaded from the plane and it was reassuring. I have previously had issues in Chicago with getting wheelchairs and having mine delivered to me in a reasonable time. Before the trip I did what I always do first after booking: I make sure I have transportation to the hotel. It turned out to be more difficult than I expected. There is a train from the airport to downtown, but my flight was getting in right at rush hour, and I wa...

Update 2/16/26: Ten days after I finally received my IPhone back, it stopped working again! This time I was in California and I was unable to make or receive calls.  I contacted Apple and, after some troubleshooting, we determined I once again had a hardware issue. I went the next day to an Apple store and they immediately wanted to send it in for repair (once again, Xfinity would take not responsibility. I reminded them that the phone was only six months old and it had been kept a month for the last repair. I felt it was time I got a new phone and that's what I was told would take place if this happened again. They claimed that wasn't possible. The trip home was a bit tricky without a working phone and I went into my local Best Buy to see if they could fix it. I was told the insides of the phone would once again need to be completely replaced. The part took a week to arrive and I had to bring it back, then precede to reset my entire phone for the third time in six weeks. Needl...