Special Assistance Travel and Lost in Translation (2/24/26)

Today Bob and I traveled from Madeira to London Heathrow, which I’ll describe later, but I need to confess to some “confusions” I had while we were in Madeira.

First, the evening of the first full day we had in Madeira, we walked up a pretty restaurant-lined street to a market where we bought food for dinner. As we were walking back by the restaurants, I commented to Bob that “they even have an Iranian restaurant.” Bob was immediately interested as he has an Iranian friend from Austin that he thought of when I said that. Well, if you notice the word “Madeira” is Made + Ira. So, when something is made in Madeira, it is termed Madeiran. When we walked by a Madeiran restaurant, my mind saw it as Made + Iran and read that as a made in Iran restaurant or an Iranian restaurant. Bob never let me forget it, as there were quite a few “Iranian” restaurants that we saw while in Madeira.

My second misinterpretation came during our first tour when the guide was talking about a walk that you could do from Funchal to the fishing village that we were looking over. He kept saying that the walk started at the Lidl in Funchal. Well, there is no Lidl supermarket in Funchal (I looked!). On our second tour,we picked up people from a hotel near the Lido Beach (didn’t know there was such a thing), when I suddenly realized where the walk started (thus my walk yesterday).

Finally, I just guessed when I should have looked something up. In my viewpoints blog, I showed a photo where I thought I was looking through an avocado or mango tree. I was not. Due to our second tour guide’s insistence on telling us all things flora in Madeira, I learned that the tree I had looked through was actually a kapok tree, whose flowers are a silky fiber used to stuff pillows.

So there you are, some Americans are able to admit mistakes…

Our travel goal today was to get from Funchal, Madeira, to the Sofitel Hotel at the London Heathrow Airport. First step was to get from our hotel after breakfast to the Madeira airport. That was easily done, as Bob had scheduled car transportation via the Bolt app for pickup at 8:30 am.

We were flying Easy Jet airlines and had requested Special Assistance due to the current state of Bob’s hip. This didn’t mean much on our arrival, but we got the full treatment this time. Bob had a wheel chair pickup at check-in that took us all the way to the gate and then to an impressive people mover transport onto the plane.

It looked like this.

First, we stood on the flat platform in front of the bus where we were lifted up to entry level into the bus. There was Bob and another woman who had the Special Assistance. I just got the benefits. We strapped ourselves into our seats and when the plane appeared ready for us, the bus drove over to the plane.

It moved the platform to bus and platform to the level of the plane door, and we walked directly onto the plane. All other passengers were also bussed out to the plane where they climbed stairs onto the plane.

Tomorrow, the hotel has scheduled a wheelchair pickup for Bob here to assist with getting us through check-in to the gate and onto the airplane. While it is a bit heady to go right to the front of the line for travel, it will be even better when we can finally understand next week what is going on with Bob’s hip and when it can get fixed.