This year, on Martin Luther King Jr. day, my dear husband took me on a downtown walkabout to try dipping my toes into the waters of street photography. I have done but little of this kind of thing for a number of reasons. For one thing, I am fairly immobilized these days due to pain and require assistance to get around in a wheelchair. For another, I am not what one could call “inconspicuous” – and it’s always been my feeling that street photography requires a subtlety that eludes me. However, I wanted to try, and Paul always enjoys going downtown so off we went.
We had a wonderful time together; but we happened upon an unexpected surprise at our first stop when we arrived at the park and heard the strains of a beautiful a capella voice singing the Star Spangled Banner in the distance. We followed the music and found ourselves at a MLK Jr. celebration! I was able to take a few photos of the singer, the crowd, and Mayor as she was giving a short address, but things started to get loud when protesters began shouting her down. I felt uncomfortable with the escalation in the mood, and vulnerable in my wheelchair, so I decided we should move on to another stop. I hope and assume that all remained peaceful there, and the police presence was only precautionary.
We went on to someplace just off Central downtown, and did a little walking/wheeling about so I could enjoy the tall skyscrapers and cityscapes.
After I had gotten as many photos as I wanted, we went and had lunch at The Old Spaghetti Factory before heading home.
There was, however, one hitch in our get-along, as it were….
The parking garage where we parked had a 6’9″ clearance, which was juuuuuuuust a little bit too short for the van. Unfortunately, there’s no way to back out once you’ve already committed to entering the garage, so we crept along and found a place to park on the first level and seemed to be clearing everything just fine.
However. On the way out, the path took us down instead of straight out on the same level, and it got dicey as we inched along, until we heard a scraping on the roof and suddenly in front of us, a deluge of water burst out of the pipes, while the hotel’s fire alarm started going off and lights flashing everywhere. We were stuck, and had apparently caused a big problem.
Security arrived, the fire department arrived, they figured out that when we hit the pipe above us, it shoved the end of it further along and when that broke the water burst forth. Eventually the water slowed to a trickle and then a drip and finally stopped; the alarms were turned off, and it was decided the only way out was to let a whole lot of air out of all our tires. So Paul did that and then we followed the security guys to exit in a different direction and made it out with great sighs of relief.
We drove very slowly and carefully on our nearly flat tires to our lunch at the Spaghetti Factory, which was on the way to the nearest gas station with an air pump (there are really no gas stations downtown at all, so it was a few miles) and were able to then make it home, where Paul filled them up the rest of the way.
Such adventures we have! Never a dull moment.
