If you have children who travel alone

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Okay, so I'm probably violating the terms of service, but Alex can remove this post if he likes.

There is an article on the front page of Wrong Planet. It is an important "read" for anyone who travels who is on the spectrum. There have been a couple of incidents of the kind she describes, one of them fatal (in Florida), and it's something that everyone should understand. It has happened to me, and who knows how many other people.
BTDT

the idea of any of my aspies travelling alone scares me tremendously.

I've been travelling alone since I was six and nothing has ever gone wrong. I'd rather travel alone any day than with a family member (it's much more relaxing! lol).

For the benefit of those who haven't read the article, and can't find it anymore, could you tell us what you're talking about?

I've traveled alone 3 times perfectly well. Twice across the country and once to italy. i was with a school group most of the time there, but i also managed to make my way around rome all by myself for half a day and all of another day! this was a major accomplishment for someone who gets lost driving around her own town.

the article was about a woman who was travelling via plane...the airlines had screwed up , which resulted in her having to wait for the next flight. she became very upset, and the airlines threatened to get the cops involved....she ended up seizuring.can't remember exact outcome, though

My 5 and a half year old baby aspie longs to go out on his own. If you leave a door unbolted he'll be gone. It happens often and we have to run and hunt for him as soon as we realise he's gone or we'd never see him again. I would love to be able to just open the door and let him out like we all did from the age of 5 when I was a kid in the 70s but the world is a busier, more dangerous place now, especially for a little kid who wouldn't be able to express himself well to strangers.

I didn't read the article, I'm responding just to title of thread.
Disclaimer:I'm NOT saying bad things can't or won't happen to other people travelling, regardless of dx. I wasn't dx'd until adulthood, so I must be able to "pass" well enough for "normal" not to attract attention from strangers/authorities. I managed to accomplish much through ignorance of peril, now I look back & go "how did I dare do that?"-I know better, therefore take less risks. This isn't advice to not worry about a loved one travelling-just wanted to share my actual (relatively benign) past experience.
I often went places on my own as a kid and nothing ever happened to me. I took the Greyhound bus across the U.S. and back, I took a plane to New Zealand, I took a train in upstate N.Y. I could've been lucky-whatever the reason, I've remained safe (from both people and things). When things have gone wrong (scheduling, timing, customer service issues) I've been able to cope with authorities/employees in the situation-again, my naivetee worked for me. It's gotta' be luck that my luggage hasn't ever been lost !
Mind you, all this was before 9/11, so travelling is a much more stressful enterprise/undertaking now. Understand the world has changed in many ways, including less personnel (though more security-oriented folks, not really what we need) in local areas to provide continuity & extra attention at various transportation locations. In "the old days" (20 years ago), one might know one's local station/ticket agent, possibility for some familiarity, and less fixation on fear & rules.
I'm worse at going places now than I was when I was young-guess my tolerance has shrunk.

Well, my daughter doesn't really "travel", but just her walking the 1/4 mile from her bus stop to home by herself makes me nervous. She is lost in her own little world and doesn't pay attention very well. Last year the school goofed up on their callendar and I sent her to the bus stop a day early after Winter Break. She came back 30 minutes later: sobbing, couldn't even explain what had happened because she was so emotionally overwrought. She thought she had been late and missed the bus. Poor kid. I reamed out the school for that one. Hubby now goes in to work a little late and drops her off in the morning(unless he's out of town) and she only walks home in the afternoon. We communicate via walkie talkies and she calls me once the bus drops her off. It's worked out well so far.

ETA: I myself am scared S***less to travel alone. I hate even going to the store or the doctor without my husband. But then I also have serious anxiety issues about driving too.

Last edited by Jennyfoo on 23 Oct 2006, 1:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I travell alone on buses and trams and it scares the s*** out of me.

I am 18...

When my son was 13 he travelled by plane and was looked after as a minor. At 19 he wasn't qualified and had to travel alone. His connecting flight was cancelled and he was sent to another city for a different connecting flight. It didn't occur to him to contact anyone, even though people were scheduled to meet him at the airport and it was a difference of six hours.

I'd been tracking his flights online and saw the cancellation and called the airline. They told me what change had been made but refused to tell me if he actually managed to negotiate the change and board that flight because he wasn't a minor. Nothing would convince them that he had special problems and couldn't be viewed as a fully capable adult. I was at least able to let the people meeting him know of the change but it took those six hours until he arrived to know it had all worked out.

This was overseas travel, so his cell phone was useless. We'd researched the airport and found an internet cafe and asked him to use it to email home if he had any problems. He found the place but decided not to use it because the smallest amount of time you could get was 15 minutes and he figured he'd waste at least 10 of that. He accepted the explanation that communicating with people worried about you trumped any small (or even large) expense, but I could see he wasn't really convinced.

I guess my point is travel puts you in a lot of unexpected situations in crowded places dealing with strangers and the Aspie's difficulty understanding someone else's feelings and motivations can really get in the way in these predicaments.

When my husband was a teenager, he met his (deadbeat) dad who lived out of state and would visit him, taking the bus, plane or train. Once, he missed two flights because he was reading. He just got caught up in reading and couldn't "hear" his flight being announced. He had a vacant, dull look to him and I think they just thought, "stupid teenager". and they were able to put him on the next flights.

Vlad flew to Mexico alone when he was 9 y/o he was perfectly fine.

There are a couple of threads I have noticed here:

1) Anxiety - I usually get this in 2 places, before the trip is going to happen and during the trip. My biggest worry is that things will not go as planned. As I have gotten older though, I have been able to adjust my plan to existing situations. I had a couple events happen to me though where things have not gone as planned:

i) Lake Effect Snow - Even the weather men cannot predict that. The first time I ran into that was Driving along Lake Michigan in Indiana/Michigan where it started as black ice and then turned into deep snow. I was already running a day late due to a snow storm in Wisconsin. I also had another time on Xmas Eve trying to drive to Buffalo where I hit a storm in Chicago and drove along with it all the way to Buffalo. That storm was real bad. I was going about 40 mph max on the Indiana Toll road and people were spinning out and going into the ditch behind and in front of me.

ii) Airport Delays - The worse was when I went to Rochester MN from Newburgh NY for a job interview with IBM. The plan was delayed in Newburgh due to storms in Chicago, I missed my connecting flight and was stuck walking around O'Hare Airport for about 7 hours (I watched security for over an hour without being questioned at all. This was a year before 9/11). Just as I was getting ready to finally board the plane to Rochester, the airline personnel asked if I minded being bumped. I turned and told them "If you bump me, then you will get me a rental car because it will taken as long for you to fly me to Rochester as it would have taken for me to drive the same distance." Needless to say, I was on that flight.

2) Letting others know where you are at - When I was in my late teens/early 20s, I would give my mother fits because I would take off someplace such as Toronto (about 90 minutes from Buffalo), spend the day there, and she would have no idea where I was at. I used to do that as a younger teen too when I would ride my bike from Buffalo NY to Niagara Falls NY.

what is it about your son that makes you view him this way?

It's his difficulty communicating. He will devise his own explanation for something, or his own plan for dealing with a problem. Often it is based on an idiosyncratic line of reasoning with no relationship to what is actually happening, or without getting information from someone that would help solve the problem. I could easily see him in an airport deciding where or when to find a flight without asking anyone to supply a piece of information he was missing and purely by concluding that his supposition seemed logical to him or he couldn't think of an alternative so that must be the right answer.

This is exactly the response he gives when asked why he decided on a course of action in a lot of situations where he avoided talking to someone and getting the information he needed. He lost a job because he repeatedly guessed what to do and often guessed wrong and created problems. His boss understood his problem and was always asking him to seek information and communicate and we reinforced this at home, but it was a big hump he had a lot of trouble getting over.