The Golden Rule in traveling with a disability is to ask a lot of questions.

Even if you use a travel agent, it's a good idea to talk directly with the hotel, airline or ship service to make sure they can accommodate the traveler with a disability.

"Be honest with your needs," said Norma Nickols of Kirkland's Access for Travel. "A travel agent or hotel won't know what you need unless you tell them."

The number of people with disabilities in this country is sizable and growing - some put the figure at almost 50 million, which includes almost 2 million in wheelchairs. At some point, they want to venture out of their routine, either on a vacation or a trip back home to visit relatives.

Nickols advises people to use a travel agent who has training and experience working with people with disabilities. Not only can they help make the vacation successful, she said, but sometimes they can find you cheaper rates.

But even advance planning won't guarantee there won't be problems. Some travel guidebooks may say a particular hotel is wheelchair accessible, but when you get there, you find three or four steps leading up to the lobby.

The hotel rooms may be accessible, but getting to those rooms may prove to be more difficult than just wheeling down the hallway. What's accessible to a young male in a wheelchair may not be accessible for a senior citizen or someone with a chronic disease.

My family recently took two family cruises, one to Alaska and the other to Disneyworld. Both ship lines said the boats were wheelchair accessible, but the Disney ship had 2-inch-high steel lips around each door leading to the outside and no ramps to get a wheelchair over them.

Either my teenage sons had to muscle me over these lips or I had to wheel down to the bow of the boat to the one outside door that had a ramp running over that lip.

The Alaska ship, on the other hand, not only had ramps over all the doorway lips, but even the Alaska towns where we stopped were set up for people in wheelchairs with no steps at store entrances and extra wide aisles inside.

You have to be "friendly, but firm" in making your needs known to an airline or other service representative, Nickols said.

"I tell them I use a wheelchair and will need a boarding chair when I get to the (airplane) door. I will ask to have my wheelchair put in the plane's closet. If they can't store it there, then I'll get gate tags and have my chair waiting for me when the plane lands. You always remind the flight crew about getting your wheelchair before you land," she said.

Unlike most businesses and industries, airlines weren't required to be part of the Americans With Disabilities Act which requires businesses to be, among other things, accessible. Instead, airlines follow the 1986 Air Carrier Access Act which is suppose to ensure that passengers with disabilities get equal treatment.

But the National Council on Disabilities said in a report to Congress that "air travelers with disabilities frequently find air travel unnecessarily humiliating and upsetting" and the act has been violated "countless" times, with complaints ranging from airlines refusing to provide boarding chairs for passengers to failing to escort children with disabilities to connecting flights.

Karla Winship, director of Therapeutic Recreation Services for Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup, teaches people in wheelchairs how to get around. Winship said she urges her students to ask lots of questions when making travel plans.

If traveling by plane, people should ask what will happen to their wheelchair once they get to the gate. Will it be checked through or can it be stored onboard? She said she recommends removing everything from the chair before letting it go with the rest of the baggage. Is the bulkhead seat available? What is the boarding order? First on/last off or the opposite?

Some businesses have made an extra effort to make their vehicles accessible. Amtrak now has rail cars that allow people in wheelchairs to get on and off and wheel throughout without a problem. Most cruise lines have made their ships accessible.

Merideth Tall, president of Victoria Clipper, said her father was in a wheelchair, and that "caring for someone in a wheelchair makes you aware of the problems they encounter."

When she started her business in 1985, Tall said she was "determined to have wheelchair-accessible vessels. Although my Norwegian builders had never done this before, I requested an accessible toilet and lowered bulkhead.

"We do have some difficulty with some of the heavier motorized wheelchairs," she said, "but we try to make it happen whenever we can."

With a little planning, going on vacation doesn't have to be a trip into the unknown. It can still be an adventure, but it doesn't have to be a disaster.

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