This weekend the farty pants family went to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to the De Young Museum. They are celebrating their 1 year anniversary since re-opening (Remember the 1989 earthquake?) and since we are STILL trying to sell our house, we have to leave every time there is an open house. So we pack up the kids and head to San Francisco. It’s a nice short 40 minute drive and we get their without incident.

We find parking. (Yeah!) and we load the kids into the doublewide twin stroller for our days adventures. Let me back up for a second. The stroller was plan B. Plan A was to put the kids in our backpack carriers and walk around the museum with them strapped to our backs. We don’t own any of these backpack carriers so we lined up a couple. One from my sister and one from my wife’s friend. My sister came through. My wife’s friend fucked up forgot and left without putting it out for us. SO with one carrier, we knew we weren’t going to be able to pull this off.
We loaded the kids into the stroller (which they HATE, HATE, HATE) and made our way up to the museum. This was my first sign that I was not going to be having any fun today. As we walked up the handicap ramps and made our way through 1 mile of zig zagging ramps, that wrapped around for ever, we finally made it to the museum entrance. (Note: the entrance was about 100 yards for normal walking folks up the stairs and at least 500 yards of rolling ramps.)

Once we at the entrance a nice man help open the door for our doublewide stroller and off we went to buy tickets. After being raped at the ticket counter, I rolled the stroller into the expansive lobby area of the museum. I should have known at this point that this was too good to be true. Then it began. Whoever was the brilliant mind who thought that making each entrance into the gallery rooms 3 feet wide didn’t read the disability code for California. Or… maybe my double wide stroller is just too wide.

After fighting, yes FIGHTING! my way through the bottom floor of the museum, I was about to kill my complaining kids, beat my wife and put a gun in my mouth to end it all. Okay, really I was just totally freaked out that a handicap person could not enjoy this museum even if they wanted to. Well okay, the part about killing the kids kind of crossed my mind. They just wouldn’t shut up. Can you imagine 17 month old twins not enjoying a museum? Does that make me a bad father?

So, like I was saying, after surviving the bottom floor we head to the elavators. What the heck fuck is this? The door opens to the ONE elevator in the whole place that goes up, and the entrance is about 2 1/2 feet wide. Even less than the fucking doorways to the gallery rooms. A guy in a wheel chair can’t roll himself out without scraping his knuckles on the doors. As I make way for him, he says to me, “good luck”. A handicap guy says good luck to me.

Needless to say, I won’t be going back to that museum with a stroller again. And now I have a clearer understanding of the issues handicap people face everyday just trying to live and enjoy a bit of culture.

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